Changes

|title= Drood

|author= Dan Simmons

|buy= Yes

|borrow= Yes

|pages=816

|publisher= Quercus

|date= October 2009

|isbn=978-1847249326

}}

It's 1865, and Wilkie Collins is writing down a text so bizarre, so full of the secret, creepy, unearthly, both damned and damning, he is going to make sure it is locked away for at least a century after his death. So it's now 2009 and I'm left with the almost eight hundred page result on my lap.

There are several things about the book that will divide the readership – the cosy Dickens fan abhorring the overtly supernatural and blunter sections of this – but remarkably, the length of the book should not be one. Yes I would have preferred it to be a lot shorter, but I have tastes that tend towards the briefer book. I'm actually glad the book reviewing gods made me give this a second look (and third, fourth, eighth…). Were one in the mood for a long, chilling wallow in gothic Victoriana (a real ''sensation novel'' as Collins was deemed to write) this would be just the ticket.

There are more real-life people and famous criminals to be found in [[Murder in Paradise by Alanna Knight]], likewise set in the 1860s, while further subterranean, gothic Dickensian thrills are to also be had in [[Joe Rat by Mark Barratt]], which is far too much fun to be left to the teenage audience.

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