CLAIMED! by Gertrude Barrows Bennett

Credit where it’s due. Most times, when a Big Five publisher touts a book as “weird”, the best you can hope for is a slight departure from convention. The story is narrated by an urn. Oooooh. Everyone’s wounds begin to shimmer. Aaaaah. It was written by Murakami. Sigh. With their new series, Penguin have really backed themselves, not relying on their own sense of weirdness but jumping head-first into the Weird Fiction movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. You know, H.P. Lovecraft, E.T.A. Hoffmann et al.

Claimed! is indeed… well… pretty weird. Dr. Vanaman is called to the sickbed of industrialist Jesse Robinson after Robinson is bashed during a burglary. The thief was after a strange green box with an indecipherable glyph. With the help of Robinson’s plucky niece, they go off in search of the box’s origins. Bennett mines every Lovecraftian trope imaginable, with tentacled monsters, dastardly kidnappings, gateways to Hell and demonic possessions aplenty. All on the high seas. It would make for a rollicking, if silly, adventure had it not been for the laboured archaic prose. I guess some books just age badly.

That said, I’d still take it any day over ol’ Haruki.

Claimed! by Gertrude Barrows Bennett
Penguin, 2024 (First pub. 1948)
127 pages