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Dan Simmons' The Terror is a novel that earns its nearly 800 pages - though not without making you work for the reward. Based on the doomed Franklin expedition of 1845, which set out to find the Northwest Passage and was lost with all 129 hands, Simmons constructs a fictional account that blends meticulous historical research with supernatural horror. The result is a book that is by turns magnificent and maddening, often within the same chapter.

The greatest strength here is atmosphere. Simmons works remarkably hard to paint an intensely realistic picture of what life was like for the men trapped in the ice, using flashbacks, vignettes, and diary entries to capture the anxieties of existing in a constant state of flux. The Arctic becomes a character in its own right - the perpetual darkness, the temperatures plunging far below zero, the groaning of the ice against the hulls of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. You feel the cold in your bones reading this. You feel the claustrophobia of a lower deck and the creeping dread of dwindling coal supplies and tainted tinned food.

The novel cycles through multiple points of view, and Simmons takes time with each man to allow the reader inside their heads. Captain Francis Crozier - alcoholic, bitter, overlooked for promotion - emerges as one of the most compelling protagonists in modern horror fiction. His arc from self-pitying drunk to resolute leader is handled with genuine care. Sir John Franklin, by contrast, is portrayed as a bigoted buffoon with a tendency toward poor decisions, and the tension between his imperial confidence and Crozier's hard-won pragmatism gives the first half of the book real dramatic weight.

For such a long book where history offers relatively little to fill the pages, Simmons does an excellent job pacing the story and creating events that slowly build the saga of the two ships. That said, the pacing will test some readers' patience. The opening chapters are heavy with exposition, and there are stretches where two characters will discuss the measurements of each ship in minute detail - the kind of research that perhaps should have remained in the author's notebook rather than on the page. When Simmons moves past the info-dumps, though, the narrative becomes genuinely difficult to put down.

The supernatural element - a monstrous creature stalking the crew across the ice - is the book's most divisive feature. During most of the novel it functions as an uncomplicated bogeyman, adding external conflict to a narrative already charged with it. The men are already dying of scurvy, starvation, lead poisoning, and madness - do they really need a monster as well? Yet the supernatural thread resolves the plot in a surprising and effective manner, tying into Inuit mythology through the enigmatic Lady Silence in ways that feel earned by the final act, even if the journey there occasionally strains credibility.

Some chapters feel like filler with no real consequence to the plot, and there are gratuitous details in a couple of scenes that add nothing. The book could comfortably lose 150 pages. But when The Terror is at its best - and it frequently is - it delivers a devastating portrait of imperial hubris meeting an indifferent wilderness. Adversity brings out the best and worst in human nature, and the men reveal themselves as savage, brave, loyal, or mad against the stark, unforgiving white landscape.

This is a flawed book, but a powerful one. It rewards patience, and it lingers long after you close it.