Fiction Reviews
William Hope Hodgson
Horror Stories(2024) William Hope Hodgson, Flame Tree Press,
£20 / Can$40 / US$30, hrdbk, 430pp, ISBN 978-1-804-17796-9
Hodgson, in the company of Algernon Blackwood, Bram Stoker, H. P. Lovecraft, M. R. James, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, Arthur Conan Doyle and many other fine and distinguished authors of the late Victorian era, created the foundations of the modern short story, the weird, the dark and the delightful, the supernatural and the fantastic and the imaginative. This new collection of Hodgson's tales highlights his sinuous storytelling prowess, and range and depth of his wonderful work. The 'Flame Tree Gothic Fantasy, Classic Stories and Epic Tales' collections bring together the entire range of myth, folklore and modern short fiction. Highlighting the roots of suspense, supernatural, science fiction and mystery stories, the books in Flame Tree Collections series are beautifully presented, perfect as a gift and offer a lifetime of reading pleasure.
Here we go again, another one of Flame Tree Publishing’s gothic fantasy collections. This time we have classic tales written by William Hope Hodgson, and given Hodgson’s fame regarding certain stories or novels, such as being the creator of that ghost-finder Thomas Carnacki, the bearer of the Electric Pentacle, as well as his novels The Boats of the Glen Carrig and The House on the Borderland, Flame Tree have done a fine job with this collection. How so? Well, the collection is divided into four parts. The first being “Carnacki Tales” which contains seven Carnacki stories. The second section comes from Hodgson’s love of the sea – he tried to run away several times to become a seaman, and finally did with the help of an uncle, therefore the second part is comprised of nine stories under the heading “Dangers at Sea”. We are still seabound in part three, which gives us Hodgson’s first novel The Boats of the Glen Carrig. Finally, the last part is entitled “The Weird and Strange”, and includes the first eleven chapters of his novel, The House on the Borderland.
As in other Flame Tree collections, each story ends with “If you enjoyed this, you might also like…” followed by the titles of other stories to read and where to find them in the collection. Unfortunately like some of their other collections, the pages do feel a bit cramped due to the spacing and small font used, fortunately, Hodgeson isn’t another Arthur Machen with entire pages of solid text without paragraph breaks, or any dialogue, phew.
However, if I were to be critical of Hodgson’s writing he is guilty of doing a lot of “telling” rather than “showing” and he has a habit of going over the same ground in some of the stories, but you have to give him full marks to being a leading exponent of weird fiction, and also giving us one of the major characters of the occult detective sub-genre. Hodgson came before Lovecraft and had his own version of cosmic horror, and Carnacki talks of psychic forces known as the “outer monstrosities” who live beyond the Earth, but will sometimes descend to try and have their evil ways with us. Carnacki has had his encounters with these beings, but sometimes he deals with more Earth-bound spirits taking unusual forms such as a bride-to-be haunted by a horse, or a room haunted by a whistler, even a haunting at his own mother’s house. Despite being aided by ancient texts, Carnacki is a very modern detective using his electric pentagram and photography to help him with his cases which sometimes aren’t as supernatural as they seem.
The sea is a vast and sometimes, terrible, place, and Hodgson draws on the unknown, the vastness of the ocean, creatures that may dwell below the surface, and the downright weird, for some of his ocean tales. Being trapped in the sargasso sea is also used by Hodgson several times as are natural phenomenon such as underwater earthquakes or volcanic eruptions which release “things” from the depths, and he does like stories involving derelict ships and this collection features two – “The Mystery of the Derelict” and “The Derelict”. Sadly, his story “The Haunted Pampero” doesn’t appear in the “Dangers At Sea” or “The Weird and Strange” sections. as it is an entertaining yarn with a very unique monster.
However, there is plenty of weirdness and strange creatures in part three of the collection which reprints Hodgson’s novel The Boats of the Glen Carrig which again gives us a stricken ship as well as tree-mutants and vampiric weed men, and is a great yarn, merging horror with adventure.
Finally, we get several weird and strange stories in the last part of the collection, with some of them clearly belonging to Hodgson’s sea oeuvre such as “The Derelict”, “The Stone Ship” and “Demons of the Sea”, but this section does give us weird horrors, even psychological horror and some cracking titles.
Hodgson was an important figure in the fields of weird horror, sea-faring horror, and occult detective fiction, and this is fine introduction to his work and will hopefully inspire the reader to seek out the rest of The House of the Borderland, and his novels The Sea Pirates and The Night Land.
Ian Hunter
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