Drood: A Novel

So Dan Simmons has a new book out. Luckily he must have told Michelle about it so she could buy it for me because otherwise I don't think I would have known. I'm not sure how I feel about living in a world where a new Simmons novel is not front page news or at the very least trumpeted in the blogosphere. Maybe I just hang out with the wrong crowd.
Anyways the new book is called Drood and is, like most Dan Simmons books, a horror-tinged exploration of a literary giant or two. The Hyperion Cantos explored the works of John Keats and had a killer robot thing called the Shrike. Ilium/Olympos was all about Homer, Shakespeare and Proust and had a killer monster in the form of Caliban from The Tempest. Drood is all about Charles Dickens and has a killer vampire thing named Drood. Unlike those first examples, Drood is not sci-fi but rather historical fiction with, as far as I can tell, very few liberties taken with historical fact.
What really? How can that be? Well, the narrator is Wilkie Collins, someone I only knew of because gabrielle read The Woman in White on our Malaysia/New Zealand excursion. Collins is tortured by professional jealousy of Dickens and "rheumatical gout" which he medicates with laudanum and other opiates. And if I tell you any more you will perhaps not enjoy the book as much as I did.