I finished
The Terror book and tv series earlier this week. Each was good in its own way. The book was written ten years ago, before the Terror and Erebus (ships) were discovered, so some things in it do not match up with what we now know to be reality. The tv show took into account the fate of the vessels, so it is more up to date in that respect.
The book jumps around in time a lot in the beginning, which I did not like. I sometimes got confused by all of it. The series OTOH, was linear throughout, which made things a lot clearer.
My guesses about the monster - The Tuunbaq - turned out to be almost entirely correct. Except the whole were-bear possibility. Other than that, it is as I guessed.
It was originally created as a sending by the goddess Sedna, and sent to kill the other gods. It was both physical and spiritual, so could enter either realm. It was made to kill. That is all it exists for. But the other gods turned it back at Sedna. She was prepared for this, and cut off its spiritual half, so it could not reach her in the spirit realm.
That left it essentially banished to the physical world. It continued doing the only thing it knew how to - kill all living things. So the shamans banded together and found a way to not so much control it, but contain it, and propitiate it. A special group of shamans evolved just to serve as its guardians. They would keep it away from humans (and humans away from it), and instead supply it with animals to satisfy its bloodlust. They would also appeal to its vanity by honoring it. They gave up their tongues to it (the Tuunbaq would bite out the tongues of every prospective shaman). That gave them ability to sort of communicate with it, in turn for giving up their ability to talk to anyone else.
Show / Hide Spoiler Text Above!All in all, I really liked the whole mythology and motivations behind the monster. But the trouble with it is that it often forgets that it is supposed to be the monster in a horror story. What I mean is that it is often absent for huge stretches of time. It just goes on vacation from killing or something. In most horror movies or novels you only get a few rare glimpses of the monster in the first third of the story or so. Once the second Act gets going it finally appears full on, and the story turns into a race between the monster killing everyone, or someone escaping/finding a way to defeat it.
But that never really happens here, in the book or show. The monster turns up for a few minutes here and there, and then vanishes for long stretches between (in the internal time within the story, months would go by without it being seen).
Both the book and tv show try to make up for this by filling up the rest with two other antagonists. The first is the simply the danger of the environment (which to be honest, is more than enough to kill people with ease). The second it the evil of humanity. I really liked the whole Man vs Nature parts. I think just it alone would have made for an excellent story. The Evils of Man part I was sort of iffy about. Mainly because the author naturally chose a gay person to be the big evil human (we know he is evil right off, because he is gay after all!).
Both book and show slightly offset this by also presenting a gay couple who are not evil. But they of course never act gay (kiss or anything else). Because that would be evil after all. The show does not even acknowledge that they were lovers. They just have a few knowing looks, and once in a while their hands brush against one another when passing a book between them. The book comes out and says they are gay, but they stopped having sex together years before and would never do so again. So that made it safe.
But OTOH, neither source really makes a big deal out of the gayness either. There is only one scene where the evil gay guy and another are caught inflangrante. Then we never see anything else. So you could almost forget he is gay. TBH, he might not even be gay, but pansexual. Or even aesexual. He strikes me as someone who would do anything to get what he wants, and anything to manipulate people.
In the book there is not really too much too him. The tv series did a lot more with him and the whole Evil of Man theme. By the end I could see that the real monster was not the Tuunbaq, it was the explorers. I don't want to give more spoilers, so I won't go into details about how it turns out. But both book and show had good and bad points to their endings. I think the show's end was more dramatic. But the book's was more satisfying (and long and drawn out, but it ends on a good note, and explains the Tuunbaq). The show never really explains the Tuunbaq. It evens embraces its ambiguity by having one character say to another that they were not meant to understand the mythology of it.
All in all it was a good book/show. But I think would have been better without the homophobia that the author seemed to feel was necessary.