Gertrude Barrows Bennett

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