Sam Gafford

Josh Reynolds “Corpse-Light” is dedicated to “H. P. Lovecraft and W. H. Hodgson and all the shunned houses and derelicts quietly rotting.” It’s an entertaining story, and part of Reynolds series detailing the adventures of Randolph Carter and Harley Warren before the latter meets his end in Lovecraft’s “The Statement of Randolph Carter”. There is indeed a “shunned house” here. It’s on Wacalaw Island off the Carolina coast, deserted because of the Spanish Flu, and about to be turned into a golf course. Warren, reckless adventurer that he is, is looking for evidence of a particular fungus normally found in the pyramids of Egypt. It’s kind of a combination of Hodgson’s “The Derelict” and Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House”.

What’s a journal on Hodgsonian without a Carnacki tale? And James Gracey gives us one with “A Hideous Communion”. Moderately interesting, it has the occult detective going to Ireland and investigate sightings of his friend’s dead wife. The solution to the mystery is a novel one.

Since it combines Hodgson and geology, I, of course, was delighted with Joseph Hinton’s “The House on the Burren: The Physical and Psychological Foundations of The House on the Borderland”. It looks at Hodgson’s time in Ardrahan, Ireland where he lived from age nine to twelve. Ardrahan is 20 miles away from the Burren, an area of karst topography in Ireland which, with its sinkholes and caves, may have influenced the setting of Hodgson’s novel. R. Alain Everts’ biography of Hodgson, Some Facts in the Case of William Hope Hodgson, Master of Phantasy, claims that the local Catholics, who Samuel Hodgson was sent to convert, were hostile to him. Supposedly, there were threats to kidnap his children (though William Hope Hodgson spent a lot of that time in England at boarding school). Accounts from the 19th century quoted by Hinton paint the locals as few and poor and enslaved to the papacy. Some interpretations of The House on the Borderland have seen the swine-creatures as metaphors for the fear of the Irish peasant.

The House on the Borderland is the Hodgson work that gets the most attention this issue, and Liam Garriock effusively praises it in “The House on the Borderland: The Ultimate Horror Novel”.

Looking at the general motif of sinister pigs and pig men is Leigh Blackmore’s “’Ye Hogge’: Liminality and the Motif of the Monstrous Pig in Hodgson’s ‘The Hog” and ‘The House on the Borderland'”. In a long and heavily illustrated essay, Blackmore looks at the use of porcine imagery in popular culture, liminality in The House on the Borderland, and Hodgson’s short stories. Blackmore agrees with critic Amanda Boulter that both of the Hodgson’s works are about infection of the body and spirit. Blackmore compares the colors of Carnacki’s electric pentacle to Hindu Chakra magic which associates certain colors with certain effects and points of the body though he admits that we don’t know how much, if anything, Hodgson knew about Hinduism. The only explicit Hindu allusion of Hodgson’s is in The House on the Borderland. Blackmore sees Hodgson as defining Carnacki’s Outer Monstrosities as “blind cosmic forces” with no special hostility towards man though no concern either. Carnacki compares them to sharks. To me, that analogy doesn’t hold up. The shark isn’t sentient enough to have a grudge against humans, but, in the right circumstances, the shark is very interested in a person. The shark is a biological machine created by blind cosmic forces, and that machine can be hostile towards humans. It’s interesting to compare that (though Blackmore doesn’t) to Hodgson’s “The Derelict” that has another living entity, a huge fungus on the derelict, created out of random cosmic forces and inimical to the humans it meets though it may be unthinking.

Joseph Hinton’s “A Particular Phase of Constructive Thought: Hodgson’s Trilogy of Novels” looks at Hodgson’s first three novels. In the preface to The Ghost Pirates, Hodgson said the novel closed “a particular strain of constructive thought”. Hinton looks at the similarities in those works. The novels present stories where normal reality intersects with another sphere of existence. (In The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” that occurs only at the beginning of the novel.) All three novels present solitary characters or a group of characters isolated. Sometimes the isolation isn’t purely physical but social too when characters don’t share all they know with other characters as in The Ghost Pirates. Sometimes old social rites are abandoned like the peculiar burial of a dead sailor in The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” where no service is said over him as if the men are in a place beyond the grace of God. These novels also show these other realms with entities or forces inimical to the characters, and a challenge to a human centric and theologically explainable world. Hinton alleges that the Carnacki stories, published after The Ghost Pirates, were probably already written when that novel was published thus take on some, but not all, of those themes.

As I’ve noted, Hodgson often introduces his weird menaces with unexplained noises before they are revealed to sight. Ryan Jefferson’s “Utter Quiet in All the Land: A Recurring Motif” usefully looks at another Hodgson use of sound. Jefferson shows that Hodgson uses silence in contradictory ways. He plausibly argues Hodgson may have been influenced by his father, an Anglican clergyman, reading the Psalms and their mention of silence. In The Night Land, the greatest menace is the House of Silence. And it is not just a physical silence but a telepathic one. X does not telepathically hear the youth taken into the House of Silence. In “The Hog”, Carnacki senses the danger he is in by saying “silence was trickling around the room”. In the narrator’s vision of the plain with giant statues in The House on the Borderland, he mentions “abominable silence”. However, silence is also mentioned in the connotation of rest and tranquility in The Night Land. The Country of Silence is where X frequently went as a boy and is the burial place of the dead. In The House on the Borderland, the Sea of Sleep is said to be a place where “intense stillness prevailed”.

“Terminal Eden: The Last Redoubt and the Closure of History” by Brett Davidson is overly long and disappointing from an author whose who fictional extensions of Hodgson’s The Night Land and critical articles I’ve generally liked. Davidson spends some time talking about H. G. Wells and Hodgson. The former’s vision is pessimistic in the concluding future vista seen in The Time Machine sees. It has no humans in it or civilization. Hodgson, on the other hand, puts both in the far future of The Night Land. Davidson then talks about the various books that would have been available to Hodgson including one he thinks may have been influential on Hodgson’s conceit of the Last Redoubt: Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun. Davidson writes too long on a subject he knows from his academic credentials – architectural theory – and doesn’t really, to me, make the connection to Hodgson clear. He does talk about how Hodgson seems to conceive of life and death as radiative forces as depicted in the image of the Dark Sun and Green Sun in The House on the Borderland, and Davidson seems to link this together with sort of a zeitgeist of scientific occultism that was present in the day even if Hodgson didn’t imbue it directly. However, Carnacki may have been influenced by Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence, and Blackwood was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn. Davidson does interestingly note that the conception of time in most sf stories is cyclic. Hodgson’s vision of time is linear. The Last Redoubt, says Davidson, can be seen like a Pharaonic tomb – the storehouse and last repository of not a man but all of humanity.

This issues also has three poems by Charles Danny Lovecraft.… (más)

There are two significant essays here that justify the Hodgson fan – or even those just curious about the man and his work – buying this 71 page book: “Writing Backwards: The Novels of William Hope Hodgson” and “Houdini v Hodgson: The Blackburn Challenge” Both were first printed elsewhere in, respectively, Studies in Weird Fiction No. 11 and Weird Fiction Review No. 3.

“Writing Backwards” concludes, by looking at some letters of Hodgson’s, with the following composition dates of Hodgson’s novels: The Night Land (1903?), The House on the Borderland (1904), The Ghost Pirates, (1905), and The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” (1905). This contradicts Gafford’s statement in “Hodgson’s First Story”, another essay in the book, that, by 1904, Hodgson had already written all his novels. Gafford speculates that Hodgson’s novels became less strange and imaginative as Hodgson worked towards a style he thought more commercial.

“Houdini v Hodgson: The Blackburn Challenge” deals with the legendary meeting on October 24, 1902 between Harry Houdini and William Hope Hodgson and documented by several newspapers. Houdini, as was his usual practice, publicized a challenge to the locals that he would pay a £25 reward if he couldn’t escape from “regulation restraints used by the police of Europe and America”. Hodgson offered a counter challenge. He would bring his own restraints to Houdini’s performance and bind the escape artist himself. If no escape was performed, the reward would be paid to a local Blackburn charity. Hodgson hoped his challenge would publicize his flagging gym, and Houdini complacently responded to another local challenge to his ability as an escapologist.

Hodgson came with his own restraints and bound Houdini tightly and complexly using his knowledge of human anatomy. Usually, Houdini was free in 15 minutes. This night, though, he was still bound after 35 minutes. Houdini asked for the iron chains and cuffs to be released for a minute since his arms were going numb and were bloodless. Hodgson refused. It was a contest, “not a love match”, he said.

Eventually, after two hours, Houdini got loose. His escape scraped skin off his arms, and he was bloodied. Indeed, he carried the scars the rest of his life. He always hated coming back to Blackburn since it reminded him of “that terrible Hodgson night”.

There were mutual recriminations by Hodgson and Houdini of cheating. Houdini, of course, had a long career ahead of him though he was more cautious about his challenges after that. Hodgson lost his ploy to save his gym. Bad for him but good for us since he then embarked on his career as a full-time author.

“Meet Mrs. Hodgson” looks at Betty “Bessie” Gertrude Farnsworth, born in 1877 and only a day before her husband. She and Hodgson knew each other in school. Hodgson and Farnsworth met again in London in 1912 and married in 1913. She worked as an editor at Women’s Weekly. Hodgson, in a letter to his sister, said Bessie was “not at all good-looking” but an accompanying photograph doesn’t support that. The Hodgsons moved to France a month after marrying and then returned when World War One broke out. Bessie lived with Hodgson’s family in Borth while he was in the army. She kept Hodgson’s reputation alive until she died in 1943.

“MATANGO!” looks at the sole film adaptation of a William Hope Hodgson work, in this case “The Voice in the Night”. Gafford claims the movie was almost banned in Japan because the mushroom people were said to be reminiscent of survivors of the atom bombings in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

“WHH in WWI” briefly looks at Hodgson’s military career and the details of his death at a Forward Observation Post on April 19, 1918 as the British Army retreated from the German spring offensive.

“The Non-Fiction Hodgson” is a brief account of Hodgson’s non-fiction and speculative essays with brief descriptions of some pieces.

“The Copyright Volumes” looks at the pamphlets from what seems to be a vanity press named R. H. Paget. They were printed in America to secure American copyright for Hodgson’s work Six were done altogether, and Gafford lists the contents.

The rest of the essays have fairly self-evident titles.

“A William Hope Hodgson Chronology” covers his life and also has some dates for his mother, wife, and his sister.
“A WHH Publishing Chronology” is not complete. I’ve found at least one Hodgson story omitted. It does include non-fiction pieces and reprints.

“A Life on the Borderland” is a brief account of Hodgson’s life with comments on some of his most significant works. Gafford cites, for biographical information, R. Alain Everts, Samuel Moskowitz, and Jane Frank.

“Hodgson’s First Story” looks at “The Goddess of Death” published in 1904. By that time, Hodgson had collected 494 rejection slips. Samuel Moskowitz says the motif of the statue may have come from a statue of Flora in the park at Blackburn where Hodgson lived at the time.

We also have “A Brief History of Hodgson Studies”, “A Hodgson Mystery” about the mystery of the dedicatee of Hodgson’s The Ghost Pirates, “On ‘The Baumhoff Explosive‘” aka “Eloi Eloi Lama Sabachtahni”, and “Hodgson’s Serial Characters”.… (más)

I wasn't sure what to expect with this particular magazine, but by all measures it exceeded my expectations. Each story was written to quality prose standards, and rather than a tedious retreading of existing ghost-hunter tropes, there was a great deal of inventiveness in the settings and styles at work here. The Edwardian and Victorian eras do show up here, but we also see noir-infused 40's or 50's America, pre-modern England and Scotland, and modern day New Orleans and Los Angeles. All-in-all another impressive debut from Electric Pentacle Press.… (más)