PositiveThe Washington PostIt reads like adventure and yet it makes even the toughest war stories seem a little pale by comparison … Ironically, the best parts of Matterhorn aren't the battle scenes, which are at times rendered with a literal precision that borders on mechanical. Rather it is Marlantes's treatment of pre-combat tension and rear-echelon politics. It's these in-between spaces that create the real terror of Matterhorn: military and racial politics; fragging that threatens the unit with implosion; and night watch in the jungle, where tigers are as dangerous as the NVA … Given the long list of stellar works, fiction and nonfiction, to come from the Vietnam experience, one might question what more can be said about it. In some ways Matterhorn isn't new at all, but it reminds us of the horror of all war by laying waste to romantic notions.
Dan Simmons
PositiveThe Washington Post\"It\'s a story perfectly suited for fiction, if only because we have so little else to go on. Dan Simmons\'s new novel, The Terror, dives headlong into the frozen waters of the Franklin mystery, mixing historical adventure with gothic horror — a sort of Patrick O\'Brian meets Edgar Allan Poe against the backdrop of a J.M.W. Turner icescape. Meticulously researched and brilliantly imagined, The Terror won\'t satisfy historians or even Franklin buffs, but as a literary hybrid, the novel presents a dramatic and mythic argument for how and why Franklin and his men met their demise … This mix of historical realism, gothic horror and ancient mythology is a difficult walk on fractured ice, and anyone without Simmons\'s mastery of narrative craft would have undoubtedly fallen through. Despite its Leviathan length, The Terror proves a compelling read.\
