William Hope Hodgson

The lifeboats of the sunken 'Glen Carrig' are lost in a strange sea. The survivors make landings on two strange islands, both of which seem to have been plucked from the drearier portions of Dante's Inferno. The sailors have to fight storms and monsters, but the main enemies seem to be the dismal islands themselves.

The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig'

The Boats of the "Glen Carrig"

Caleb Yarian

Here's how I feel about William Hope Hodgson generally:

Writing as he did at the beginning of the 20th century, Hodgson's creativity in the realm of supernatural horror is impressive given what few authors preceded him in the genre. Although he wrote many stories that partook of elements common to supernatural fiction of his era (i.e.,most of his short stories, including the Carnacki stories), he also broke new ground. Moving beyond the ghost stories which had, for the most part, made up the genre before him, he created landscapes and creatures that feel not just super-natural but really extra-natural, coming from a completely different reality, either unrestrained by morality or subject to a construction so alien as to be unknowable, that is just recognizable enough to be terrifying. Hodgson's landscapes and creatures are very similar to the Cthulian creations of H.P.Lovecraft, a later admirer of Hodgson, in that they are gigantic in their physical and temporal dimensions. His universe is far older and larger than human and earth-centered histories allow, and subject to forces and intelligence completely removed from human concerns or anthropomorphized deity.

If Hodgson worked merely as a set designer or painter of still images he would have been difficult to match. However, he wrote narrative prose and this choice of medium is his downfall. Hodgson couldn't write a human character to save his life and the pacing of his stories is excruciatingly slow. Although female characters in stories from this era and genre are typically pretty flat, Hodgson's are so flat as to be almost unrecognizable as human. His male narrators are almost unidentifiable emotionally, never demonstrating much fear or empathy for others. The inaccessibility of his characters robs Hodgson's stories of much of the fear that the other elements enable. 

Finishing a Hodgson novel is an exercise in endurance. The good elements are very good and the bad are horrible.

The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig'

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