The Terror

The Terror is a novel by the American writer Dan Simmons, published in 2007. It is a fictionalised account of the Franklin expedition, in which two Royal Navy ships sailed north in 1845 to find the Northwest Passage and never came back.

The ships are HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, under Captain Sir John Franklin and Captain Francis Crozier. Most of the characters are real members of the crews, among them Commander James Fitzjames and the ship's surgeon, Dr Harry Goodsir.

The expedition is frozen into the Arctic ice with coal and food running low, and the crews are worn down by cold, scurvy and illness, then by mutiny and, eventually, cannibalism. Across the ice, something is stalking them and picking off men one at a time.

Simmons builds the book from the historical record of the expedition and from the long speculation about what became of it, moving between the officers and the ordinary crew so the decline takes on a documentary texture before the horror does. The creature is his one invented element. It is a standalone novel, and it was adapted into a television series.