William Hope Hodgson

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William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918) was an English author of horror and fantastic fiction. He also attracted some notice as a photographer.

Born November 15 1877 in Blackmore End, Essex, Hodgson ran away to sea at the age of thirteen and eventually served in the Merchant Marine. After a "body-building" business venture failed he decided to support himself by writing. His early works, "The Voice in the Night" and The Boats of the "Glen Carrig", were based on his experiences at sea.

Hodgson's works are chiefly in the occult or horror genre. Despite his often laboured and clumsy language, there is a critical consensus that he achieves a deep power of expression, which focuses on a sense not only of terror but of the ubiquity of potential terror, of the thinness of the invisible bound between the world of normalcy and an underlying reality for which humans are not suited.

His two chief achievements are the novels The House on the Borderland, of which H. P. Lovecraft wrote: "but for a few touches of commonplace sentimentality [it] would be a classic of the first water",[link] and The Night Land, a sombre vision of a sunless far-future world. Lovecraft observed of The Night Land that it was "seriously marred" by repetitiousness, verbosity, and "nauseatingly sticky romantic sentimentality", but added that, for all these flaws, it was one of the "most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written."[link]

The Ghost Pirates has less of a reputation than The House on the Borderland, but is an effective seafaring horror story of a ship attacked and ultimately dragged down to its doom by supernatural creatures. The book purports to be the spoken testimony of the sole survivor, and the style lacks the pseudo-archaism which makes The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" and The Night Land tedious reading for many.

Hodgson also created the "detective of the occult" Thomas Carnacki, who appeared in several short stories.

When World War I began, Hodgson enlisted in the Royal Artillery. He was discharged after a head injury, but afterward re-enlisted. He was killed by an artillery shell at Ypres on April 17 1918.

Works

"A Tropical Horror" (1905)
"The Voice in the Night" (1907)
The Boats of the Glen Carrig (1907)
The House on the Borderland (1908)
The Ghost Pirates (1909)
The Night Land (1912)
"The Derelict" (1912)
The Dream of X (1912) (shortened version of The Night Land)
Carnacki, the Ghost Finder (1913) (collection of short stories)
Men of the Deep Waters (1914) (collection)
The Luck of the Strong (1916) (collection)
Captain Gault, Being the Exceedingly Private Log of a Sea-Captain (1917) (collection)
"Eloi Eloi Lama Sabachthani" (20 September 1919) Originally published as "The Baumoff Explosive".

Recent collections

Out of the Storm: Uncollected Fantasies (1975) (Sam Moskowitz, ed.)
The Haunted "Pampero" (1991) (Sam Moskowitz, ed.)
Terrors of the Sea (1996) (unpublished and uncollected fantasies, Sam Moskowitz, ed.)
The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" and Other Nautical Adventures: The Collected Fiction v1 (2004)
The House on the Borderland and Other Mysterious Places: The Collected Fiction V 2 (2004)
The Ghost Pirates and Other Revenants of the Sea: The Collected Fiction V 3 (2005)
The Night Land and Other Romances: The Collected Fiction of V 4 (2005)
The Dream of X and Other Fantastic Visions: The Collected Fiction V 5 (2005)

External links

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