In the novel, while Franklin and his crew are plagued by starvation and illness, and forced to contend with mutiny and cannibalism, they are stalked across the bleak Arctic landscape by a monster.

[2] Most of the characters featured in The Terror are actual members of Franklin's crew, whose unexplained disappearance has warranted a great deal of speculation.

[3] The Terror was nominated for the British Fantasy Award in 2008[4] and adapted for the first season of an eponymous television series that aired on AMC TV in 2018.

In a flashback to 1845, Sir John Franklin is assigned by the British Admiralty to lead an expedition into the Arctic in search of the Northwest Passage.

They accidentally shoot the man, whereupon they are set upon by the monster, which kills the expedition's fourth in command, Lieutenant Graham Gore.

Crozier subsequently orders Caulker’s Mate Cornelius Hickey (for wearing a white polar bear costume) and two other men (for unbecoming behavior) to be given fifty lashes.

After ruling out an attempt to reach the far side of the Boothia Peninsula, Crozier and Fitzjames conclude that their best hope is to haul the lifeboats of both ships south to the Back River and row upstream against the current to an outpost on Great Slave Lake, an arduous journey of several hundred miles.

The monster appears with deadly frequency, at one point slaughtering an entire boat crew as they explore an open lead in the ice.

With no other options, the men continue to press south and eventually reach a position on the southern shore that they name "Rescue Camp".

It is called the Tuunbaq, a demon created millennia ago by the Esquimaux goddess Sedna to kill her fellow spirits, with whom she had become angry.

After a war lasting 10,000 years, the other spirits defeated the Tuunbaq, and it turned back on Sedna, who banished it to the Arctic wastes.

Travelling with an Esquimaux group, the family encounter the still-standing Terror almost two hundred miles south of her original location.