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  • The Terror

  • A Novel
  • Written by: Dan Simmons
  • Narrated by: Tom Sellwood
  • Length: 28 hrs and 28 mins
  • 4.6 out of 5 stars (291 ratings)

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The Terror

Written by: Dan Simmons
Narrated by: Tom Sellwood
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Publisher's Summary

The men onboard HMS Terror have every expectation of finding the Northwest Passage. When the expedition's leader, Sir John Franklin, meets a terrible death, Captain Francis Crozier takes command and leads his surviving crewmen on a last, desperate attempt to flee south across the ice. But as another winter approaches, as scurvy and starvation grow more terrible, and as the Terror on the ice stalks them southward, Crozier and his men begin to fear there is no escape. A haunting, gripping story based on actual historical events, The Terror is a novel that will chill you to your core.

©2007 Dan Simmons (P)2017 Hachette Audio

What the critics say

"The best and most unusual historical novel I have read in years." (Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe)
" The Terror is both dazzling history and a sparkling chiller." (Caroline Leavitt, People)
" The Terror is nothing less than a revelation. Dan Simmons is a giant among novelists, and I am in awe of his achievement." (Lincoln Child)

What listeners say about The Terror

Average Customer Ratings
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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Fantastic!

This was the best audiobook I have EVER listened to. The narrator was beyond amazing- accents, characters. everything.

7 people found this helpful

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Amazing!

Listened to many audiobooks, this was the best by far. over 150 audiobooks and I've never given a 5 star review until now

3 people found this helpful

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Stick with it!

Love the premise, but much like the TV show I kept falling asleep at the beginning of this story.

Maybe it would've been different if I was physically reading the story but I found I wasn't really hooked until just under half way through. After that I constantly made time to listen to this book.

I can't imagine what the research was like when Simmons was crafting this book. I really liked how all the various storylines wrapped up by the end too. I think this proves that I should go back and try to finish the show now (kept falling asleep in the first few episodes)!

2 people found this helpful

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Tense and gripping

Even though some plot points are telegraphed, the author is so good at putting you in the scene! You feel the characters' dread, their indecision. Very suspenseful.

2 people found this helpful

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Best narrator I’ve heard yet

The man could not have done a better job. He added so much to this dark and suspenseful story.

2 people found this helpful

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More like Farley Mowat or Jack London then Simmons

Should be a disclaimer for Simmons fans. This is not that. Depressing on top of that.

1 person found this helpful

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Great

Great book, great story but the narration really enhances it even more. Loved all the accents

1 person found this helpful

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great read. Lots of tension, lore, history

listened to it almost every waking hour.
Finished it today only to find out 2chapters from the end they made a movie series haha.
Thats next :D

1 person found this helpful

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Harrowing

I went to school with the son of Owen Beatty - the University of Alberta researcher who discovered and examined the graves of the men who died in the Franklin Expedition. Dr Beatty came into our class to deliver a lecture on the expedition in 1985 - an amazing story. Dan Simmons does admirable research to inform this dark tale about the ill-fated mission. The facts (dates, personalities, procedures) are accurate, but the to-this-day-unexplained death of these men provides an opportunity to construct an engrossing tale of paranormal intrigue. Simmons introduces mysterious Inuit occultists, ghostly omens, men being stalked and hunted by some malevolent spiritual/cryptozoological entity, and descent into cannibalistic madness. Simmons becomes overly metaphysical, anthropological, and etymological in the last few chapters of the book, but that is a minor flaw.. for the vast majority of the book he masterfully weaves a genuinely dark atmosphere. The writing is full of tension, moodiness, and disturbing imagery. The description of terminal scurvy, for example, is gut-wrenching.
Simmons uses a non-linear storytelling technique -  relating the desperate actions of the survivors during years trapped in ice, the hopeless attempts to escape, and simultaneous retrospective explorations of the planning and experiences of the men back in civilization and early in the expedition. The result is immersive and captivating.

Tom Sellwood does an above-average job conveying the mood intended by the text. He has a deep, smooth voice that expresses emotion marvellously. The suspense in the tale is exhibited by Sellwood with truly chilling effect. Some of the chosen accents are a little strong - rendering some segments difficult to follow - but the text is presented clearly and crisply. Sellwood gives a professional performance that is a joy to peruse..

Altogether, this is a well-crafted 9/10 horror/thriller. It's a dark, entertaining read - well worth a credit.

1 person found this helpful

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Listening a second time

I had watched the series on Amazon and enjoyed it so much that I picked up the audio book as well. I’m on my second time listening. Such an enjoyable performance and story.

1 person found this helpful

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  • Randall
  • 2018-07-24

Very good then, NOT


I love a good historical fiction, and three quarters of this book was fantastic.

A tale of hardship followed up by bad luck and tragedy. Not to give anything away, but they find themselves stuck fast in the ice while trying to find a passage to sail north of Canada. they begin to be hunted by what appears to be an extremely large Polar Bear.
The crews of the 2 ships struggle to survive and many parish. The story is told in, through the eyes experiences from many different crew members .
BUT THEN at about chapter 62 the story tales a bad left turn and never recovers.
This is my first Dan Simmons book and I was impressed in his many detailed characters,and the telling of the story through their experiences.
I will definitely try another Dan Simmons novel soon

143 people found this helpful

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  • Matthew S. Hill
  • 2017-11-16

F**KING AWESOME!!!

Thank you Dan Simmons for writing such a fantastic epic horror, historical, supernatural, adventure novel that is “The Terror”.

For the days that I spent listening to this book, I ate more ravenously, I felt colder then normal and I thought a lot about “what would I do if placed in a similar situation”.

“The Terror” is the story of two English naval ships that set out on an exploration in 1845 and become trapped in solid ice... that’s the shortest synopsis. The real story is about the people’s lives on the ships. The people you get to know intimately and grow to love and hate or the other way around. There multiple villains to this story, from the unseen “Ursa Maritimas” (or is it) lurking around the ships, to the mutinous sailors, to the most important villain of all... the ice.

I highly recommend this emotional roller coaster dark, epic book.

The narration by Tom Sellwood was amazing and I loved listening to his ability to change his tones and accents ever so slightly to conjure the image of the new characters.

64 people found this helpful

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  • JENNY L.
  • 2018-07-25

This book DRAGS on forever!

This book dragged on for for so long I often got drowsy listening to it. It was about 19 hours longer than it had to be. If you like books that give you the descriptions of every single little detail, this is your book.

Of all the deaths of the crew, two of them were a surprise, I had thought they would live.

The narrator did a great job but I doubt I will buy another book from this author, I like my audio books when I am driving and this one is NOT something to listen to while driving!

58 people found this helpful

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  • dpen11
  • 2018-10-16

Drawn outtttttttttttt

I was not a fan of this book but listened til the end. It was a long drawn out story and very depressing. At times I felt that the author got carried away with the supernatural aspect which I found just out of place with the rest of the book. I found the monster following them to be unbelievable and the back story annoying. It was also an extremely depressing book, no high points. The parts that did hold my attention in the book was the information on scurvy and how starvation really effected the men on the boat. What I also found informative was the ship and what went into sailing the sea in the 1800's. I did enjoy the main character. I did enjoy the reader. I'm not really sure how this book received 4.5 stars

50 people found this helpful

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  • Ian
  • 2018-04-15

Too Much Of A Mediocre Thing

Basically I have two main criticisms.

The first is the narrator who was just a terrible choice for this book. His voice has now depth to it, no gravitas, and listening to characters who are meant to be hard-bitten sea-faring types is akin to hearing teenagers role-playing practising their all 'grown up and stuff' voices.

As a comparison, I'm now listening to the Patrick Melrose novels narrated by Alex Jennings who's capable of giving clear and distinct voices, across accents and gender, and can thus give his characters both variation and life. Sellwood just wasn't up to this task.

The second criticism is of the book itself. If Stephen King can be accused of 'verbal diarrhoea' in the length of density of his books, then Dan Simmons must do his writing from the toilet seat.

Good grief but the man can waffle, especially towards the end of the book and in particular the last chapter or two which should be full of melancholy and atmosphere but instead seemed to be little more than the other showing off his 'Inuit to English' dictionary.

Another occasion where I find myself distinctly in the minority. How this has 4.5 stars baffles me.

So, yeah, two main criticisms of an audiobook; the audio... and the book.

50 people found this helpful

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  • anne
  • 2017-04-03

Good but then...

Great narration and the story started out good but it's long and then it began to drag. Truly there were some terrifying and haunting moments. I WAS invested in the very well developed characters so I rode it out. Then somewhere around the 17th hour there was some shouting in different accents that sounded more cartoonish than dramatic and I realized I didn't know what was going on because I'd just completely tuned out. This plus the boredome just made me resentful and I stopped listening. It's not that I can't listen to long books but I dunno... I couldn't stay with this one.

47 people found this helpful

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  • Kim Venatries
  • 2017-03-07

Finally in Unabridged Form!

I've been waiting for years for this in unabridged format. Dan Simmons tells a gripping story of courage and perseverance amongst the crews of HMS Erebus and Terror. Fascinating historical detail mixed with all kinds of horror. One of my all-time favorites expertly narrated by Tom Sellwood.

44 people found this helpful

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  • Justin W.
  • 2018-04-16

Too drawn out.. I wanted to like it

I almost gave up on this book for the simple fact that they took a very interesting plot and overall cool, dark atmosphere and drug it completely too far out. This book could of been compressed by half and been so much better. I found myself daydreaming so much that I had to rewind because I missed something. The narrator, however, is very good!

43 people found this helpful

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  • Gary
  • 2017-06-02

One of the few books I've ever given up on

This is an interesting concept for a story - take a real life adventure discovery event and wrap it up in a horror story with a relentless monster. But relentless has become the operative word for me. This book is relentlessly dreary and hopeless. Two doomed crews stuck in the ice while S L O W L Y starving to death, S L O W L Y freezing to death; plagued by scurvy and some demon creature determined to slaughter every member of the crews over a L O N G L O N G period of time. The sense of foreboding and hopelessness really started to mess with my day to day attitude and by the time they abandoned ship while dying one by one of scurvy I just couldn't take it anymore.

Of course, I'd kind of like to know how it all turned out. In real life the entire mission was lost in the ice - interestingly only to be discovered fairly recently. And I would like to know who or what the monster was and his unusual relationship with Silence. At first I thought that perhaps she was one of the Harry Potter animagus, but after a few telling scenes it seems to have turned out not to be the case. A lot of people seem to love this story and I can't blame them. Simmons is a popular writer and I admire most of his work. The narration was superb, but I have to listen to something a bit more uplifting after being immersed within this doleful morass. I think I have the biography of Ghengis Khan up next. I can hardly wait. It has to be better than this one.

41 people found this helpful

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  • Barbara
  • 2018-08-11

Don't Bother

worse than the TV series. Boring and slow. hard to hold my interest. Did not finish!!!!!

40 people found this helpful