The Terror
2007
- fiction, historical
- fiction, horror
- fiction, action & adventure
- fiction, sea stories
- fiction, historical, general
- fiction, thrillers, general
- historical fiction
- horror
- thriller
- shipwrecks
The story
The bestselling author of Ilium transforms the story of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition into a devastating historical adventure that will chill you to your core.The men on board Her Britannic Majesty's Ships Terror and Erebus had every expectation of triumph. They were part of Sir John Franklin's 1845 expedition – as scientifically advanced an enterprise as had ever set forth – and theirs were the first steam-driven vessels to go in search of the fabled North-West Passage. But the ships have now been trapped in the Arctic ice for nearly two years. Coal and provisions are running low. Yet the real threat isn't the constantly shifting landscape of white or the flesh-numbing temperatures, dwindling supplies or the vessels being slowly crushed by the unyielding grip of the frozen ocean. No, the real threat is far more terrifying. There is something out there that haunts the frigid darkness, which stalks the ships, snatching one man at a time – mutilating, devouring. A nameless thing, at once nowhere and everywhere, this terror has become the expedition's nemesis. When Franklin meets a terrible death, it falls to Captain Francis Crozier of HMS Terror to take command and lead the remaining crew on a last, desperate attempt to flee south across the ice. With them travels an Eskimo woman who cannot speak. She may be the key to survival – or the harbinger of their deaths. And as scurvy, starvation and madness take their toll, as the Terror on the ice become evermore bold, Crozier and his men begin to fear there is no escape...
What it’s like
Long stretches of bleached white and grey: pack ice that groans and shifts under a low, colourless sky, lamplit wooden decks hung with frost, and the dim, smoky interiors of two cramped ships where coal smoke and tallow light blur the edges of every face. The prose is dense, period-textured and deliberately slow, with long descriptive passages on cold, hunger and the physical rot of scurvy, so the reading feels like being shut in with the men as the ice tightens. Its mood is bleak and claustrophobic, a creeping dread that builds gradually rather than arriving in jolts. Violence is present and often graphic, including mutilation and cannibalism, with horror that lands through suggestion in the dark more than through quick gore; the sexual content is minimal. It suits a long, unhurried read on a grey winter weekend with the lights low, not a gentle or light-hearted pick. It is for readers who love immersive historical fiction, Arctic exploration stories and slow-building horror, and who don't mind a long book that stays cold.
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