Dan Simmons deserves props for conceiving a unique premise for a novel and thoroughly researching the subject matter.

Now, get him an editor.

In newspaper parlance, "Drood," is a notebook dump — a story engorged and bloated because a reporter couldn't resist using every single quote and scrap of information gleaned during the interview process.

Simmons, similarly, has taken a promising idea and transformed it into a vehicle to demonstrate the full extent of his knowledge about the life and death of Charles Dickens.

More than 770 pages of knowledge makes what should be entertainment too long by half.

As signaled by the title, "Drood" is another riff on Dickens' great unfinished novel, a theme exploited in the musical "The Mystery of Edwin Drood."

"Drood's" narrator is based on Wilkie Collins, a 19th century English playwright, novelist and Dickens antagonist. The plot posits that Dickens encountered Drood in a train accident five years before he died.

By Simmons' account, that meeting drew an obsessive Dickens to the catacombs running beneath London, a seamy "undertown" where the mystical Drood engaged in "magnet arts" and "mesmeric trances."

Was Drood using a form of mind control on Dickens?

Yes, according to one character:

"Mr. Dickens will help our Master bring a New Order into being — one in which the colour of one's skin or the amount of money one has will never stand in the way of justice again."

Unfortunately, a promising narrative is too often sabotaged by drawn out discourses on forgotten works by Collins, minor characters and flights of fancy.

Simmons earned his chops in horror, science fiction and fantasy. "Drood" represents his latest effort to break into the mainstream fiction-fantasy hybrid.

The prolific Simmons would do well to pare down his next novel and adapt an aphorism associated with another prominent 19th-century author.

"Easy reading," Nathaniel Hawthorne ventured, "is damn hard writing."

sgiegerich@post-dispatch.com | 314-340-8172