Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have been a fan of Dan Simmons work for over 20 years and this is the 25th book that I have read by him. I almost always enjoy his work. That being said I have never been so surprised by all the 5-star reviews for a book as I am with this one. If you read the jacket blurb on Dan Simmons' latest novel you would think that this book was about a mysterious underworld character named Drood, who Charles Dickens obsessed over in the last 5 years of his life. Or you may think that the book is centered on Dickens himself. Both of these sound interesting but unfortunately this book is about neither. It is about, and narrated by, one Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens' friend, collaborator and competitor. This is more of a personal diary than an actual story. When you read this you will want Wilkie to get to the point on Dickens and Drood but what you will get get for most of the book is Wilkie's ramblings about every aspect of his personal life. You will get detailed self-absorbed descriptions about his writing, his 2 relationships with women, his theater work, his dining habits, his relationship with his mother, his appearance, which one of his various places he will sleep on a given night, his increasing dependence on opium, and lengthy descriptions of his domestic situations. Over 771 pages he will spare you no detail. Simmons is a good writer so some of these are interesting or humorous but nowhere close to entertain us over almost 800 pages. Yes, there is a story in here about Dickens and Drood (sort of) but maybe this covers one third of the book. To say that half or more of this book should have been lopped off by a good editor is in no way an exaggeration. But what is truly amazing is that if one manages to wade through all the minutiae of Wilkie Collins' life to get to the meat of the Dickens/Drood story there is an additional caveat - as the story goes on Wilkie is more and more impaired by opium so you can't rely on everything his says being true! Did this event actually happen? Did Wilkie imagine it? Have a hallucination? Often we never find out and you realize that most of this book is pointless. Now I suspect that the author's response to my criticism would probably point out that this is the point of the book - the jealousy, arrogance and weakness of Collins compared to the great Dickens. That may be so but I personally can't take this in such a large dose, and more importantly no one could possibly get a clue from the marketing of this book that this is in fact what it is about! I will admit to greatly enjoying the last 50 pages of this book as Wilkie's character is exposed even further; It is just a shame that it took such a long and sometimes tedious path to get there.