I recently read The Terror by Dan Simmons. I’ve been interested in it for a while because I love horror and I’m fascinated by the doomed Franklin expedition. I’ve been hesitant to read it because I’ve heard some things about the author that made me feel iffy, but never with solid evidence behind it. I finally gave the book a read and I both loved it and hated it. I wanted to put my thoughts down here and see if anyone else noticed these things and what they thought. Obviously, there will be spoilers.

First of all, I loved the in-depth detail that went into this book. It’s clear Simmons spent a lot of time researching not only the expedition, but also the arctic, the native people, seafaring terms, ice, etc. I normally don’t read doorstoppers, but I really enjoyed how much information and detail went into this book. I thought the slow pace was perfectly fitting, and the chapters punctuated by the monster’s violent appearance were fantastic.

Unfortunately, my love for all the detail in this book is also paired by my real distaste for how women, especially native girls, are treated and described. At first we just get Franklin’s inner thoughts on a native woman during a previous doomed expedition and his focus on her breasts and how he thought she was being sly and sexually evil by sleeping around with his men and pitting them against each other. I felt another explanation for this could be, native teenage girl feels threatened by the dozens of armed white men who show up and feels she must align herself with one of them for personal protection. But, I thought that since this was a Franklin chapter, we’re getting it colored by Franklin’s perspective.

But then Lady Silence shows up, who is also vaguely described as a teenage girl (with several characters thinking about how since “these women” age and mature differently than good ol’ white British women you can’t really tell how old they are… which feels gross), and then proceeds to have her bare breasts out in just about every chapter she appears in throughout the book. There’s also a lo of detail about her bare, sweaty breasts. And how they’re almost touching Irving’s silk handkerchief… it’s a real point of fixation for what felt like an uncomfortably long time. Again, this is through another man’s POV and they have been stuck and isolated out on the ice for a while, but at this point I’m seeing a pattern.

To break away from sexualizing native girls, we get Crozier’s memory… of a woman sexually using him. She has agency and isn’t being forced or coerced, and I understand this is a bit of a reversal of roles, but it’s also part of a larger pattern of the only few women we see in this book who are pretty much there for sexual reasons… unless they’re an old sexless grandmother, or chaste widow Lady Jane Franklin.

The second native woman we see is the one Irving meets… who we are told her name means “Big Tits.” And even though Irving gets this, we are then treated to another man pulling up the girl’s jacket so that we can get a gander at said “big tits.” Also, in the SECOND TO LAST PAGE of this behemoth novel we’re informed that Big Tits is still doing just fine. Cool.

I know this post is really long and I’m just ranting, but I was so unhappy with how tone-deaf the women were treated in this otherwise amazing book. I’ve described these scenes to my friends and they legit thought I was joking or being hyperbolic.

Did this bother anyone else in the book? Do you have a different take?