Tomasz Skibicki

The ending killed it for me

Reviewed: 11-23-19

A great journey ending in a terrible resolution of the story. You'd hope that human intelligence and ingenuity would overcome superstition and paranormal, but sadly, you get the exact opposite. In the first third of the book the main protagonist and who he is has an impact and a great deal of importance - he's a biology professor, well known for his skill and education and using his knowledge and expertise to push the story forward, slowly uncovering the mystery. Sadly, said mystery is uncovered in the first couple hours of the book ( I think in the first 3-4 hour mark, you might as well drop the book as all information to finish the story is there) and after that, everything about him just becomes an unimportant, forgotten memory. As the tale goes on , the importance of his past life and experiences gets just thrown out of the window and nothing matters, he becomes an empty shell saying inconsistent, out of character words that just push story forward to an already established goal. (Which you can deduce really easily, because the main character explicitly states it over and over again) The villagers of the Hyde Valley ( basically, the bad guys) have more fleshed out characters than this boring joke of a protagonist and the world building of the town is really interesting and may provoke various emotions in you, so you might as well just listen to the book for that, as I enjoyed it enough to finish the book. (Yes, I was actually more interested what will happen to this weird town rather than protagonist) Too bad the character we spend so much time with has been neglected to the point he just becomes a guy saying words moving his hands and legs around, Well, at least he lives in a beautifully crafted world full of characters that have a CHARACTER. And the performance was great!

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boring

Reviewed: 06-10-19

struggled to finish. was waiting for suspense and horror but got action instead. sadly, not a scary book

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Mistargetted target audience

Reviewed: 10-21-18

Let me start off that this book was recommended to me by a lot of people, who claimed it was rather scary and unsettling.

Given that I love scary books, I dived in right away into this almost 30 hour long adventure, and even though, the most popular criticism author Dan Simmons gets - that his books could be 1/3 of the size - this book was written and read beautifully. The characterization, the descriptions, and overall writing skill was amazing, sentences flew one into another and it was a rather smooth experience.
I think the books feels even colder than the TV show. When listening to it, I constantly felt wet from my own sweat under multiple layers of wool, and my feet and hands lost the sense of feeling from time to time.

The performance of the narrator was out of this world - I always knew which character talked, and with his amazing voice acting, a fully fledged image of the person talking was instantly formed in my head.

With all that said - this story felt flat in my mind as a horror. I didn't feel that much suspense against the unknown, the mystery wasn't ever explored to a satisfying degree and the ending was "meh" at best.

I think the target audience is either other writers, who can deeply appreciate the writings skill of mr. Dan Simmons, or people who look for a survival story in the far north.
If you are looking for a horror, or "the Terror" , I don't think you will find it here. Unless of course we are talking about the boat.

In conclusion: mediocre horror story, amazing piece of writing art in a survival setting far north on a stranded ship.
If you are looking for exploration of a human psyche at its limits: get it.
If you are looking for a scary story: I don't recommend it.

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34 people found this helpful