Drood

Drood is a novel by the American writer Dan Simmons, published in 2009. It is a fictionalised account of the last five years of the life of Charles Dickens, told by Dickens's friend and fellow novelist Wilkie Collins.

The book opens with the Staplehurst rail crash of 1865, in which Dickens, then fifty-three and the most famous novelist in the world, was travelling with a woman who was not his wife. Dickens came out of the wreckage a changed man, and Collins describes the interests that followed: the long nights spent walking the worst streets of London, the interest in mesmerism and the dead, and the obsession with a figure named Drood, whose name Dickens later attached to an unfinished novel. Collins, who is narrating, is taking large quantities of opium and laudanum while he writes, which means that the reader has to decide how much of what he reports actually happened.

Around the two novelists Simmons assembles the literary London of the period, and the book uses the gaps in Dickens's own biography as the place where its story grows.