Americanisms and anachronisms
| AN OUTSIDERS VIEW |
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| Ken Fuller |
As it’s still the festive season, let’s return to the man credited with having created the 19th century English Christmas — but this week’s Dickens is a fictional one.
In Dan Simmons’s 2009 novel Drood, Charles Dickens, having just survived a real-life rail tragedy, meets the weird, skeletal character of the title, who turns out to be a half-Egyptian master of the occult ruling a vast empire of London’s dispossessed in Undertown, the maze of sewers, caves and crypts lying beneath the British capital.
The narrator of this tale is Wilkie Collins, real-life author and Dickens’s friend and sometime collaborator (he co-authored several of the Christmas stories with Dickens and is claimed by many to have invented the detective mystery with his novel The Moonstone). Shortly after Dickens tells Collins of his meeting with Drood, the mystery-writer’s life is changed forever as Drood and his followers, having first attempted to enlist Dickens, press Collins into writing a history of their occult practices, introducing a scarab into his skull to control him..... MORE
Source: The Daily Tribune
URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20111227com5.html
1 comment
mga mahilig sa fiction novels diyan....
"As it’s still the festive season, let’s return to the man credited with having created the 19th century English Christmas — but this week’s Dickens is a fictional one."
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