Dan Simmons To Release 'The Fifth Heart', His Next Book After 'The Abominable'

Illium and Hyperion were already a stunner, but it was not until Dan Simmons released his speculative and historical works that I fell for his literature. The Terror brought all his horror and thriller writing skills into perspective that is why I really can't get enough of him. If only he could write faster.

Updated: The most recent book of him that I have had [owned, and piling in the to be read list, and never in this post have I mentioned read] was The Abominable, a novel set in the Mount Everest Antarctica (got mixed up with The Terror, which is set in the Arctic) and puts the heroes into mortal danger courtesy of an "abominable monster." (Thanks for the "graceful" correction, Michael, and as Stephen King puts it, the devils are in the details. And anyone who might have read my previous post may know that I have a hoarding OCD and a cranial injury that causes short term memory loss, which is not that all too common among early tweens like me. Thanks for judging people without really knowing them first....)

And now in the most exciting news of all he is releasing his new book most probably in 2015, two years after the former book (published in 2013). Aren't you all excited for The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons?

Take a breather before delving into this fantastic cover of The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons.

Just in case you need to see the full jacket of The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons...

In the following, Dan Simmons discusses what the book is all about.

"Last night I e-mailed off the final draft of my new novel The Fifth Heart to my literary agent, editor, and publisher. It was weird to go to sleep last night without writing the next morning's pages in my mind and weirder still to awaken today and not have that world -- Sherlock Holmes and Henry James together in America and at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair -- to go back into. It's been a long, serious, fun project."

On his website, he also added that "The Fifth Heart will be from the viewpoint of Henry James -- as deep into his psychology, heart, and mind as an honest writer can get without purely making things up and violating the success of James's brilliant efforts at self-obfuscation -- but it won't be in his language. Except for dialogue, of course, which will offer its own profound challenge. (Perhaps because of an early stutter, James had a unique verbal style, often holding up a finger and saying, "Wait . . . wait . . ." while he formed what he was about to say, and then launching into seeming endless (but rapidly produced) sentences that rivaled his own Late Style in the written word for Germanic complexity and noun-free richness.)

"But even with Henry James added to the cast of the Five of Hearts -- or at least the surviving Hearts after Clover's suicide -- there's no novel there yet for me. Playing by my rules of writing such historical thrillers -- i.e. having the actual historical characters where they were on any given day that we know of and doing what they actually did on those days -- will be hard enough with such a large cast of historical characters, but it's not yet difficult enough if The Fifth Heart is to be a conceptual and craftsmanlike quantum leap up as I want it to be from The Crook Factory, The Terror, Drood, Black Hills, and my other history-based fiction such as the Civil War-related novelette 'Iverson's Pits.'"

In February 2014, the author said that "the book won't be published for another year."