The Terror

On the surface, The Terror is about starvation, mutiny, and a beast stalking the British sailors of the doomed Franklin Expedition. However, at its core, Simmons’s novel is a dramatization of the arrogance and violence of colonialism itself. Empire, Simmons suggests, isn’t only the backdrop for horror, but is the horror. The expedition is undone not just by bad luck, poor planning, or supernatural forces, but by colonial hubris.

From the beginning, the British treat the Inuit as marginal, primitive, or irrelevant. Their language is dismissed as gibberish, their survival techniques ignored, and their cosmology derided as superstition. Even Lady Silence is rendered voiceless figuratively as well as literally, since she’s treated as an object of curiosity or fear rather than as a person. The horror here is double. On one level, the erasure of the Inuit is presented as a typical colonial pattern, denying Indigenous peoples as bearers of knowledge or power. On another level, Simmons inverts this hierarchy: The very “superstitions” dismissed by the British turn out to be true. The Tuunbaq only attacks after the British shoot and kill Silence’s father. It literalizes colonial horror by embodying what the empire refuses to recognize: That the land isn’t empty but spiritually alive, and that its laws cannot be violated without consequence.