A century of inbreeding turned a Dutch dynasty into the things under Tempest Mountain.
Who drives the story
An unnamed 'connoisseur in horrors' who hunts strange terrors for a living and brings bodyguards to a haunted house. He loses everyone who helps him, solves the mystery, and ends the story with the mansion blown up but his own nerves permanently wrecked.
The narrator's two faithful, muscular companions from past ghastly explorations, hired to guard him through the night in the Martense mansion. They fall asleep on watch, vanish without a sound, and are never seen again.
A dark, lean journalist of about thirty-five covering the attacks, unconventional enough to believe the narrator. He helps search the countryside, then dies at a cabin window during a storm, his face gnawed away.
The wealthy New-Amsterdam merchant who built the mansion in 1670 to escape British rule, founding a dynasty bred to hate English civilization. His legacy is a family marked by one brown eye and one blue eye—and, centuries on, by something far worse.
The first Martense to see the world, a colonial soldier of 1754 who came home in 1760 and found he no longer fit. He planned to leave, was told his family he died by lightning, and was in truth murdered—his skull crushed by savage blows.
The devolved remnant of the family: hair-covered, ape-like burrowers with heterochromatic eyes who emerge in thunderstorms and eat their own weak. They are the answer to every disappearance on Tempest Mountain.
How they are connected
George Bennett and William TobeyThe narrator
The narrator's two faithful, muscular companions from past ghastly explorations, hired to guard him through the night in the Martense mansion.
A dark, lean journalist of about thirty-five covering the attacks, unconventional enough to believe the narrator.
Go deeper
Inbreeding and degeneration · Isolation as a breeding ground for horror · The cost of curiosity · The buried past
Themes explainedThe full story act by act, the ending explained and a quick quiz.
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