Monday, September 15, 2008

Drood: Dickens and the Staplehurst Crash

Many have expressed curiosity in GDT's interest in the DROOD project, which is one of the films he is slated to make in the Universal deal.

Here are a couple of items to stoke your curiosity:

First - the film would be based on Dan Simmons' upcoming novel, DROOD. Here is the product description from Amazon.com:

On June 9, 1865, while traveling by train to London with his secret mistress, 53-year-old Charles Dickens--at the height of his powers and popularity, the most famous and successful novelist in the world and perhaps in the history of the world--hurtled into a disaster that changed his life forever. Did Dickens begin living a dark double life after the accident? Were his nightly forays into the worst slums of London and his deepening obsession with corpses, crypts, murder, opium dens, the use of lime pits to dissolve bodies, and a hidden subterranean London mere research . . . or something more terrifying?Just as he did in The Terror, Dan Simmons draws impeccably from history to create a gloriously engaging and terrifying narrative. Based on the historical details of Charles Dickens's life and narrated by Wilkie Collins (Dickens's friend, frequent collaborator, and Salieri-style secret rival), DROOD explores the still-unsolved mysteries of the famous author's last years and may provide the key to Dickens's final, unfinished work: The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Chilling, haunting, and utterly original, DROOD is Dan Simmons at his powerful best.

Second is this link to a letter written by Dickens following the infamous Staplehurst train accident - the historically real "disaster" referenced in the description above. It describes a bloody scene that no doubt affected Dickens profoundly.

Judge for yourself how this might fit in the Del Toro canon of films.

3 comments:

Löst Jimmy said...

All that Victorian sordid frightfulness - I like!

Erin Kubinek said...

Parker!
I'm reading this right NOW - OMG!!!!

This is going to BE SO GOOD!
I'm a chapter in and I'm hooked - so creepy!
And I can see why GDT signed on - Drood himself is like practically written FOR Doug Jones - no joke!

Anonymous said...

The book 'Drood' has recently come out in the Uk, and I am hooked so far. Its a bit daunting when you first see the size of thepaperback edition, with some 770 pages, but once you get started its so easy to get sucked into the Victorian drama of the times. I have never really been a Dickens fan, but from all the literary allusions inthis book, I shall certainly be reading some of his most famous works, when I have read Drood, that is! Dan Simmons has obvioulsy done his homework - its a fab read.