Drood

Narrator John Lee puts everything he's got into his performance of DROOD, a gothic fantasy that takes place during the final few years of Charles Dickens's life. Reading with crisp precision, Lee morphs into narrator Wilkie Collins, Dickens's jealous collaborator and competitor. Sounding, by turns, breathy or raspy or agitated, and always condescending, Lee captures Collins's flawed character with panache. Told from Collins's self-absorbed and opiated viewpoint, DROOD depicts London's other-worldly underground with creepy verisimilitude. Despite its sinister atmosphere, and some really grisly bits, this book is a love song to Dickens, with references galore to many of his better- and lesser-known works. This clever blend of fact and fiction should delight fans of Victorian England and her archetypical literature. R.M. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

Starred review from November 24, 2008
Bestseller Simmons (The Terror
) brilliantly imagines a terrifying sequence of events as the inspiration for Dickens's last, uncompleted novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood
, in this unsettling and complex thriller. In the course of narrowly escaping death in an 1865 train wreck and trying to rescue fellow passengers, Dickens encounters a ghoulish figure named Drood, who had apparently been traveling in a coffin. Along with his real-life novelist friend Wilkie Collins, who narrates the tale, Dickens pursues the elusive Drood, an effort that leads the pair to a nightmarish world beneath London's streets. Collins begins to wonder whether the object of their quest, if indeed the man exists, is merely a cover for his colleague's own murderous inclinations. Despite the book's length, readers will race through the pages, drawn by the intricate plot and the proliferation of intriguing psychological puzzles, which will remind many of the work of Charles Palliser and Michael Cox. 4-city author tour.

Wilkie Collins, friend and sometime collaborator of Charles Dickens, listens with horror to Dickens's account of meeting a purported master of the black arts. Through an opium haze, Collins endeavors to find him, even as his hatred for his friend grows. Simon Prebble's impeccable speech is the perfect match for this sinister Dickensian tale. He effortlessly shifts among the story's many characters, imbuing each not only with a voice and dialect, but also with a distinct personality. Collins's increasingly frequent bouts of paranoia sound convincingly terror-filled, without seeming "performed." And Dickens's self-important growls of pretension lead the listener to dislike him as much as Collins does. Narrative passages in the complicated plot benefit from Prebble's natural speech patterns--clear, very British, and so suited to the text as to sound as if he wrote them himself. R.L.L. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine