I examine the proliferation of the concept of the vortex in the decadent fiction of M. P. Shiel in relation to fiction’s ability and inability to represent human consciousness and its limits. I think through the way that Shiel’s fascination with Edgar Allan Poe influenced his literary vortexes, the significance of Shiel’s fiction in relation to vortical developments in physics in the late nineteenth century, and the impact of the vortex on Shiel’s engagement with whiteness and racial difference.