There are a lot of Dan Simmons books in our house, but they are not mine. My husband adores Hyperion, Endymion and all his hard science fiction: I haven't got on with it, so when he brought home The Terror a few years ago, I didn't hold out high hopes. A few days later, I emerged from the novel, shivering, terrified and Arctic-obsessed. What better read for a winter weekend than a book about people even colder than you?

The Terror is Simmons's imagining of what happened on Captain Franklin's doomed 19th-century expedition to traverse the Northwest Passage. The real story is appalling enough: Franklin's two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, set off in 1845 but were trapped in the Arctic ice for years. None of the 100-plus men on the ships survived; little is known about how they died, but starvation, hypothermia, cannibalism and lead-poisoning from the canned food they took with them have all been posited.

Skilfully, horribly, Simmons details the months of darkness – the temperatures of -50F and lower; the shrieking groans of the ice; the wind; the hunger – from the multiple perspectives of the men on board the ship, and with such detail that I defy readers not to grab another jumper. He adds in another, more deliberate evil: a stalking, polar bear-like monster which tracks over the icy wastelands around the ships, picking the men off one by one. "To go out on the frozen sea in the dark now with that … thing … waiting in the jumble of pressure ridges and tall sastrugi was certain death," he writes. "Messages were passed between the ships now only during those dwindling minutes of half-light around noon. In a few days, there would be no real day at all, only arctic night. Roundtheclock night. One hundred days of night." What a horrifying thought.

The sailors realise the ice isn't going to melt enough to free their ships during the summer of 1847, that "there would be no release from this belly of the Leviathan winter this summer. No escape from the cold belly of this ice this year". When the Erebus is crushed by the ice, the remaining men eventually decide that their best bet is to take what is left of their provisions and flee south across the frozen sea. Stalked by "the thing on the ice", starving to death, they claw their way towards Canada.

At almost 1,000 pages, The Terror is no quick read. Not, previously, a Simmons fan, I'm still not quite sure why I started such a doorstopper, but I know I couldn't put it down. I am a sucker for the story of the desperate journey, of survival (or not) against great odds, of man against nature, whether fictional (come on Frodo and Sam!) or true (Graham Bowley's No Way Down: Life and Death on K2 was an excellent recent read). It's hard to imagine a more wretched situation than that faced by Franklin and his men. Simmons, with his "thing on the ice", gives it a go.

I said last week that the fireside scene in The Hundred and One Dalmatians was the cosiest, toastiest in literature. For sheer extremity-freezing, heart-stopping, unbearable wintry cold and misery, though, it has to be The Terror. It's a truly chilling horror novel, made even more terrifying when you remember that much of the horror Simmons describes is based on reality.

• Do you have a favourite winter read you'd like to write about? If so, please wrap up 6-700 words in an email to Sarah.Crown@theguardian.com, and we'll publish our favourites. (We will try to acknowledge them – but given how "snowed under" we often are here, we can't promise to acknowledge every submission.)