The Terror A Mystery

Most essential Machen work is from the 1890s, but The Terror is one of his most developed horror tales from his later career. This often waffling novella is meandering and less focused than his dark folk masterpieces The Hill of Dreams, The Great God Pan, Novel of the Black Seal and The White People, but also gleefully manic and quite inspired in parts, developing an atmosphere of magical mystery and dread around the countryside and featuring moments of terror, particularly the harrowing final siege diary, which is worthy of Machen at his best as a horror writer. (Jim Smith)

"Explosion at Munition Works in the Northern District: Many Fatalities." The working man told me about it, and added some dreadful details. Corpses so terribly maimed that coffins had been kept covered; faces mutilated as if by some gnawing animal. . . . I took a tram to the location of the disaster; a raw and hideous shed with a walled yard about it, and a shut gate. The ...

Reproduction of the original: The Terror by Arthur Machen

The "masterfully chilling" novel that inspired the hit AMC series (Entertainment Weekly). The men on board the HMS Terror — part of the 1845 Franklin Expedition, the first steam-powered vessels ever to search for the legendary Northwest Passage — are entering a second summer in the Arctic Circle without a thaw, stranded in a nightmarish landscape of encroaching ice and darkness. Endlessly cold, they struggle to survive with poisonous rations, a dwindling coal supply, and ships buckling in the grip of crushing ice. But their real enemy is even more terrifying. There is something out there in the frigid darkness: an unseen predator stalking their ship, a monstrous terror clawing to get in. “The best and most unusual historical novel I have read in years.” —Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe

Arthur Machen's 'The Terror: A Mystery' is a horror novel that grips readers from the first chapter. Set during World War I, it follows the secret and mysterious events that took place during the war, hidden from the public eye by strict censorship. Machen's writing explores the power of the press and the consequences of suppressing information.

Working-class mum and housecleaner Lois Meade plies her sleuthing skills once again after discovering a dead body--dressed in a suit of armor--in a chapel.

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In the late 1960s, the Zodiac Killer terrorized the area near San Francisco, California, killing at least five people. The killer mailed letters to newspapers written in code, daring police to discover his identity. He taunted the police and spread fear around San Francisco and beyond. Would the police and the public, working together, find this terrifying monster?