If you missed AMC’s recent ten part miniseries adaptation of Dan Simmons’ 2007 novel The Terror, you have my condolences...it was a blockbuster. This column is not going to review the book nor the miniseries. Instead I’m going to see if the miniseries was tweaked or modified in any way compared to the actual novel. I read The Terror three years before I started reviewing books (eleven years ago) and I don’t plan on rereading a 766 page book any time soon. So I’m going to compare the last 98 pages of Simmons’ novel with the last few episodes of the miniseries to see if there are any differences. Yes, I will read the last 98 pages again, but not the prior 668 pages. I also thought that I should reprint the brief description of the story (located on the front inside dust jacket of Simmons’ novel) to see if the basic structure and plot were the same as the miniseries. The following is what’s printed:
Inside Dust Jacket
“The men on board HMS Terror have every expectation of triumph. As part of the 1845 Franklin Expedition, the first steam-powered vessels ever to search for the legendary Northwest Passage, they are as scientifically supported an enterprise as has ever set forth. As they enter a second summer in the Arctic Circle without a thaw, though, they are stranded in a nightmarish landscape of encroaching ice and darkness. Endlessly cold, with diminishing rations, 126 men fight to survive with poisonous food, a dwindling supply of coal, and ships buckling in the grip of crushing ice. But their real enemy is far more terrifying. There is something out there in the frigid darkness: an unseen predator stalking their ship, a monstrous terror constantly clawing to get in.” Okay, the first paragraph is very close to what happened in the mini series. The only two things different are minor: 132 men versus 126 men and there was no mention of the crushing ice in the miniseries.
“When the expeditions 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. With them travels an Inuit woman who cannot speak and who may be the key to survival - or the harbinger of their deaths. 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 that there is no escape.” This paragraph generally holds true to form.
“The Terror swells with the heart - stopping suspense and heroic adventure that have won Dan Simmons praise as ‘a writer who not only makes big promises but keeps them.’ With a haunting and constantly surprising story based on actual historical events, The Terror is a novel that will chill you to your core.” Okay, so far, so good. Now let’s get into those last 98 pages.
Goodsir, chapter 58, pages 669-675
This chapter did happen in the miniseries but was nowhere near as savage and dark compared to the novel. The TV series has Dr. Goodsir rub his body with poisons, drink some of it, and then slit his wrists to bleed out. The next day Hickey and his men began eating him. In the book, Goodsir is writing in his personal diary: “I have taken the final draught. It will be a few minutes before the full effect is felt. Until it is, I shall catch up on my diary. These last few days I have been recalling the details of how young Hodgson confided in me and whispered to me in the tent weeks ago on that last night before Mr. Hickey shot him. The next morning, Mr. Hickey assembled everyone and had Magnus Manson force Lieutenant Hodgson to kneel before him...then he set the long-barreled weapon to the base of George Hodgson’s skull and blew his brains out onto the gravel.” Dr. Goodsir refused to dissect the Lieutenant in front of the assembled men. Since Goodsir refused, Hickey had Manson shear off Goodsir’s two big toes. “Since that day of Lt. Hodgson’s demise, I have demurred again to the sum of eight more toes, one ear, and my foreskin.” At this point, terrible storms hit daily (not in the miniseries). As Goodsir was dying from his poisons, he wrote a note and pinned it to his chest: Eat these mortal remnas of Dr Harry D.S. Gooodsirifff yo u wisssh the poisssn withinn ths bones and flesh wiol kill yoou also. (in the miniseries, Goodsir did not warn the men that he poisoned himself).
Hickey, chapter 59, pages 676-682
“Sometime in the last few days or weeks, Cornelius Hickey realized, he had ceased being king. He was now a god.” Hickey has gone crazy, similar to the miniseries, but his meeting with Tuunbaq will be different. “When, after more than three weeks of being unable to move because of the blizzards, winds, and plummeting temperatures, his dray beasts had whined and begged for food, Hickey had descended among them like a god and provided them with their loaves and fishes. He had shot Strickland to feed Seeley. He had shot Dunn to feed Brown. He had shot Gibson to feed Jerry. He had shot Best to feed Smith...but now those he’d so generously fed were dead, frozen hard into their blanket sleeping bags or contorted into terrible claw shapes of their final throes.” Magnus is now dead in the bow, Hickey was thinking that he could bring him back to life whenever he needed him. “Suddenly, he sensed movement to the west. With some difficulty - it was very cold - Hickey turned his head left to look out to the frozen sea. Something large was walking toward him on two legs.” Hickey was not afraid because he knew it came not as a predator, but as a worshipper (haha). Hickey heard it moving around the under the tarp. “Then suddenly the thing was there, looming over the gunwales, the upper body rising six feet or more above a boat that was already raised six feet above the sledge and snow.” This was not the same confrontation that was shown in the miniseries. “The thing sniffed Magnus Manson’s body...its huge tongue licked at the frozen fall of brown blood...abruptly, yet almost casually, the thing bit off Magnus’s head. The crunching was so terrible that Hickey would have covered his ears if he had been able to lift his gloved hands from the gunwales. He could not move them...the thing smashed the dead man’s chest in - rib cage and spine exploding outward in a shower of white bone shards. Hickey could no longer move his head even an inch, so he had no choice but to watch as the thing from the ice excavated every inner part of Magnus Manson and ate them.” Suddenly, Tuunbaq’s unfeeling eyes were inches from Hickey’s own staring eyes. “Its hot breath enveloped him.” Cornelius Hickey said, “Oh.” “It was the last word Hickey ever spoke...he felt his own warm breath flowing out of him...but instantly he realized it was not his breath leaving him forever, but his spirit, his soul. The thing breathed it in. It dropped on all fours and left Cornelius Hickey’s field of vision forever.” So Hickey’s death was completely different than his miniseries death and Tuunbaq was still on the prowl.
Crozier, chapters 60-65, pages 683-742
Most of these chapters were not shown in the miniseries. Yes, Crozier did stay with the native Inuit tribe, but nobody from England came to rescue him or his men...like the last show of the miniseries would have us believe. Yes, he mated with Lady Silence and eventually had two children after she nursed him back from a near-death experience following his many gunshot wounds from the crazed Hickey (Hickey’s shooting of Crozier happened before I started with chapter 58). In the last scenes of the miniseries, you can see Crozier ice fishing with his children and that’s where the tenth show ended. But the novel does tell us about the legend of Tuunbaq and Crozier’s later discovery of his old ship. The Inuits believed, “During the first period of the universe, The Earth was a floating disk beneath a sky supported by four pillars. Beneath the Earth was a dark place where the spirits lived. This early Earth was under water most of the time and without any human beings - the Real People or others - until two men, Aakulujjuusi and Uumaaniirtuq, crawled out humps in the earth. These two became the first of the Real People. Women had joined the two men on Earth in this earliest of times, but they were barren and spent all their time walking the coastlines in search of children. The Second Cycle of the universe appeared after a long and bitter contest between a fox and a raven. This is also the time when the Real People learned about Sedna. Then there came a time, many thousands of years ago, when Sedna, the Spirit of the Sea, became infuriated with her fellow spirits, the Spirit of the Air, and the Spirit of the Moon. I’m condensing this part so you don’t blow your brains out with too much useless information. To kill them - these other two parts of the Trinity that made up the basic forces of the universe - Sedna created her own tupilek. This spirit - animated killing machine was so terrible that it had its own name - soul and became a thing called Tuunbaq. Okay, enough of Tuunbaq for the moment, let’s get back to the ice and Captain Crozier. The Captain realized that he could never go back to England. He thought, “But what if he makes it to civilization...back to England? Alone. He will always be the captain who let all his men die. The court-martial would be inevitable, its outcome predetermined. Whatever the court’s punishment might be, the shame will be a lifelong sentence."
Chapter 66, pages 743-746
“She (Lady Silence) touches his face, gets to her feet, and goes away from him, pulling the tent flap shut behind her. He (Crozier) finds enough strength to stand and to shed the rest of his clothes. Naked, he does not feel the cold. Six feet from the edge of the water he goes to both knees again and raises his face to the sky and closes his eyes. He hears the thing rising from the water not five feet from him and hears the scraping of its claws on the ice and the huff of its breath as it pulls itself out of the sea onto the ice and hears ice groaning under its weight, but he does not lower his head nor open his eyes to look. Not yet. He smells the wet fur, the wet flesh, the bottom-of-the-ocean stink of it, and senses its aurora shadow falling over him, but he does not open his eyes to look. Not yet. Only when his skin prickles and goose bumps rise at the heavy mass presence seeming to surround him and only when its meat eater’s breath envelops him does he open his eyes...he closes his eyes again, tilts back his head, opens his mouth, and extends his tongue exactly as Memo Moira taught him to do for Holy Communion.”
Now Crozier and Lady Silence are truly united.
Chapter 67, pages 747-766
This is the last chapter and where the Inuits and Crozier find HMS Terror almost 200 miles south of where she had been frozen fast near Erebus for almost three years was beyond Crozier’s powers of speculation. Since the ship had three kegs of gunpowder aboard, Crozier decided to burn the ship. “The ship burned for almost an hour and a half before it sank. It was an incredible conflagration. Guy Fawkes Day above the Arctic Circle. When the show was over and the ship was sunk and the sun was also sinking toward the south so that their shadows leapt long across the greying ice, still they stayed to point and enjoy the steam rising and celebrate the bits of burning debris still scattered here and there on the ice.Then the band finally turned back toward the big island and then the smaller islands, planning to cross the ice to the mainland before they would make camp for the night. Taliriktug (Crozier’s new name) took the squirming Kanneyuk in his left arm and put his right arm around Silna-Silence. Raven, still being carried by his mother, was petulantly trying to slap her arms away and force her to put him down so he could walk on his own. Taliriktug wondered, not for the first time, how a father and mother without tongues were going to discipline a headstrong boy. Then he remembered, not for the first time, that he now belonged to one of the few cultures in the world that did not bother to discipline their headstrong boys or girls. That’s it folks! With all the differences (that) I found in the last 98 pages, I’m going to say that there also had to be a lot of changes in the first 668 pages. I read this novel eleven years ago and just don’t recollect.
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