Claimed! - Gertrude Barrows Bennett

Claimed! - Gertrude Barrows Bennett / 144-page paperback published in 2024 in the Penguin Weird Fiction series / ISBN 9781405972925 / cover art by Kate Dehler

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Penguin Weird Fiction: a celebration of the very best of the weird, a store of novels and tales that for generations have delighted and horrified.

Woken from his sleep by an urgent request to attend to a new patient, Dr. John Vanaman is soon at the home of Jesse J. Robinson, a wealthy industrialist, struck gravely ill after a struggle with a burglar. The thief was after Robinson’s most prized possession, an item he obsessively guards: a mysterious green box, etched with a single line from an unknown language. Soon, Vanaman and Robinson's courageous neice, Leilah, are drawn into an odyssey, a voyage toward the box’s ancient, terrifying origin. . .

The greatest novel by one of the pioneering female voices in horror writing, Gertrude Barrows Bennett’s Claimed! is a masterful intertwining fantasy, philosophy, and terror.

‘The most important female writer of speculative fiction that you’ve probably never heard of’ Worlds Without End