The Terror

"I loved this book when I read it. I’m now more drawn to the TV series that was made of it, but the book still has elements that are really good. It’s what pushed me back into writing historical fiction and naval fiction. I like how it uses the setting. Again, the ship is very claustrophobic and then you’ve got them trapped in the Arctic, in the ice—so it’s double claustrophobic. You’ve got all the different crews and the personalities of the crews and the officers and how they clash and how they try to get through it (or don’t get through it, in the end). The Terror uses a real historical event as a springboard to explore quite interesting themes in historical fiction. It’s using the historical figures as characters, rather than a nonfiction, history version of them. Its detail is really good—you know what it would have been like to be trapped in the Arctic at this point in time, all the technical details about the ships and the officers, and about society that affects them. Even though they’re trapped in the Arctic, the society and Victorian morals are still really ingrained in them. I like it when naval fiction does that: it’s as if the burdens of society are still within the ship and still affecting the personalities. The Terror is such good historical fiction that you almost forget that it is a paranormal horror story as well and has a weird bear monster in it. There are some really good scenes in it. Probably my favourite is when they put on a masquerade to try and keep the men’s morale up, which is something that they did do in polar exploration. The theme of this masquerade is “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe . They paint all the rooms different colors, and in the middle, this horror bear comes in and destroys it all. It’s such a good bit of history-meets-paranormal. I still remember reading that scene—that’s how good it was. Still, I now prefer the TV series. I don’t like how some themes were handled in the book, like the female characters and the Inuit characters. The TV series writes the female characters in a much more interesting way. They’ve got more agency and more of a role in the story. They’ve all got their own backstory, their own goals and motivations. The TV series also has a really sensitive portrayal of the male characters, which influenced how I wrote my own male characters."