Claimed!

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

Gertrude Barrows Bennett (1884 - 1948) was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Writing under the pseudonym Francis Stevens, her imaginative and adventurous tales, characterised by ancient civilizations, remarkable artefacts, and fearsome supernatural beings, often blurred boundaries between fantasy, science fiction and the darker recesses of the ghost story. A pioneering female author of genre literature, her fantasy and science fiction writing was some of the first by an American woman to be widely published. Her novels Claimed! and The Citadel of Fear remain classic works of Weird Fiction.