I can't believe I've never made a post on Dan Simmons' Drood!
This was a novel I read some years ago. Dickens' Mystery of Edwin Drood, was of course his final (and infamously unfinished) novel. Though I do remember reading somewhere that one of Dickens notes or letters strongly suggests that Edwin Drood, who had mysteriously vanished during the Christmas season, had been murdered by John Jasper. Many have tried to wrap up the story, including Leon Garfield, I beleive, but the canonical end will foreer remain a mystery.
The "Drood" character of Simmons' novel, however, is unrelated to young Edwin Drrod, the character Dickens created, save possibily it's hinted that that's where Dickens got the name. It centers around the infamous train ride, on which Dickens was returing to London with his mistriss. After the famed accident occurs, Dickens does his best to help the injured passanngers. According to Simmons' novel, it is then that the author meets the title character, a bizarre vampire-ish fellow with white dead white skin and a gaping aperature for a nose, who introduces himself merely as Drood. This strange personage, helps Dickens help the injured, though he seems somehow to hover through the air from person to person.
The tale is narrated by Dickens' friendly rival Wilkie Collins, author of The MoonStone and other works of mystery and wierd fiction. It's clear from the start that Collins harbers a strong resentment of his friend for being far more famous, and partiularly hates how Dickens has become known as "the inimatable." Still, he sticks by Dickens through the final faze of his relatively short life, when his travels and readings (particularly "Sikes and Nancy"--and I still have no idea why Dickens took it on himself to act out this particularly horrid scene repeatedly on stage) were taking a toll on the author's health.
Dickens has a few more encounters with the mysterious Drood, once seeing him floating outside his window! It is never fully explained whether Drood is actually real, or a figment of the author's overwrought imagination. Who or what is he? If a hallucination (or perhaps even if not) is Drood a manifestation of
Dickens's failing health or anxiety? Or perhaps his guilt over having an affair? Has the apparition come into being as the result of the strain of writing? Simmons does not tell us, which makes it one of those stories where it's ultimately up to the reader to decide.
Drood provides a fascinating glimpse into the mind of an aging literary genius, but no concrete explanations for its elements of the surreal.
