The Ghost Pirates and Others: The Best of William Hope Hodgson: edited by Jeremy Lassen (2012)

The Ghost Pirates and Others: The Best of William Hope Hodgson: edited by Jeremy Lassen (2012): containing the following stories: 

The Ghost Pirates (1909): Brilliant short novel of the sea and its terrors is a fine, tightly plotted work of horror and disquieting weirdness. A careful, fairly slow build of suspense climaxes in a rapid-fire and horrifying climax. See full review here. 
A Tropical Horror (1905): Monsters from the sea attack a sailing ship. Gruesome stuff.
The Sea Horses (1913): Bittersweet but overlong and a bit treacly modern folktale set at sea.
The Searcher of the End House (1910): One of the weaker Carnacki the Ghost-Finder stories seems an odd choice.
The Stone Ship (1914): More weird but pseudo-scientifically plausible events at sea. Really a nice little tale of mounting terror.
The Voice in the Night (1907): You'll know what movies have lifted the central premise of this horror story once you read it. Probably Hodgson's most-reprinted piece.
Eloi Eloi Lama Sabachthani  (1919): Unusual tale set on land applies really, really odd pseudoscience to the events of Christ's crucifixion. The last few paragraphs are the most Machensque writing Hodgson ever did.
The Mystery of the Derelict (1907): Yet more weird but pseudo-scientifically plausible events at sea. Actually, remove the 'pseudo.' This could actually happen. Also one of Hodgson's tales of the Sargasso Sea. 
We Two and Bully Dunkan (1914): Humourous tale of revenge on the high seas. Certainly shows Hodgson's range.
The Shamraken Homeward-Bounder (1908): Odd, almost fabulistic sea tale.
Demons of the Sea (1923): Monsters from the sea attack a sailing ship. A minor work.
Out of the Storm (1909): Strange, disturbing tale involving shipwrecks and telegraph signals.

Overall: Really more of a career survey than a 'Best of,' as some of the selections are dubious (well, "The Searcher of the End House," "Demons of the Sea," and  "The Sea Horses").   Nevertheless, highly recommended.

The Ghost Pirates by William Hope Hodgson (1909)

The Ghost Pirates by William Hope Hodgson (1909): William Hope Hodgson's brilliant short novel of the sea and its terrors is a fine, tightly plotted work of horror and disquieting weirdness. A careful, fairly slow build of suspense climaxes in a rapid-fire and horrifying climax. 

Hodgson's early days as a merchant sailor come into full play in this tale of the cargo ship Mortzestus, plying the seas some time early in the 20th century or late in the 19th. The Mortzestus is a sailing ship on an Atlantic run. But she's also a ship whose crews have felt her to be more and more strange as the years have passed. And strange she is, and becoming moreso.

The joys of The Ghost Pirates lie in a lot of areas, from the unusual but intelligibly delivered dialects of the sailors (and of this particular sailing milieu itself, really) to the gradual but accelerating accumulation of details and events that give the novel its name. 

From the beginning, we know something has happened -- the narrative is framed as being the written testimony of Jessop, last survivor of the Mortzestus. Jessop has been rescued by another ship. Rescued from what? Well, that's why there's a novel.

The Ghost Pirates is one of two Hodgson weird novels of the sea (The Boats of the Glen Carrig is the other). Hodgson also wrote dozens of other stories set at sea, from comic pieces to thrillers to horror and the supernatural. He also wrote in a sub-genre I'd probably call 'Fictional Sea Cryptids,' tales of unusual animals and other... things... which come into conflict with human beings on or near the sea. 

The Ghost Pirates is part ghost story, part cryptid fiction, part pseudo-scientific horror story. Perhaps. Jessop offers an explanation for the events of the novel that's not a tale of actual ghosts, but he doesn't necessarily know what really caused the events of the novel. 

Nonetheless, Jessop's quasi-scientific explanation of the horrors he and the rest of the crew of the Mortzestus are beset by is in line with many of Hodgson's other stories and novels in which supernatural events are given disturbing, visionary explanations. A model of narrative economy, The Ghost Pirates is one of the treasures of weird fiction. Highly recommended.

Don't Go in the Water

Beneath Still Waters by Matthew J. Costello (1989): Fast-paced, entertaining horror novel from the 1980's with flawed but sympathetic characters and some spooky underwater action. This was apparently made into a cheapie horror movie in the mid-2000's, so avoid that. On the other hand, the edition I read was a tie-in to that movie, so the reprint did result in me reading it. 

Costello writes in multiple genres (including TV and video games). This horror novel is very much in the Stephen King tradition in terms of setting (a small North-eastern town, here in New York state rather than Maine) and set-up (ancient evil invades small town; problem must be dealt with decades after the fact). The protagonists are both reporters, which gives them reason to investigate why a small town was hurriedly drowned by a hastily built dam back in the 1930's. 

I'm assuming there were edits made to get it to a required length, as the conclusion is a bit rushed. I'd have enjoyed more of the historical 'archival' research into the origins of the horror -- it's the sort of thing Lovecraft did perfectly in many of his stories, and which Stephen King made his own in novels such as It. Recommended.

The Boats of the Glen Carrig by William Hope Hodgson (1907): William Hope Hodgson's life was cut short in his mid-40's in the trenches of World War One. Nonetheless, he left quite a literary legacy, one that wouldn't really begin to take effect until the 1930's and 1940's, when lovers of the weird started to unearth and publish his out-of-print novels and short stories.

Hodgson spent years as a sailor, and many of his best works feature a maritime setting. His novels also tended toward the archivally inclined: here, the story is 'written' in 1757 by a former passenger of the British sailing ship Glen Carrig, with the recounted adventures occurring some time earlier  in the 18th century. We start with the action already underway, the Glen Carrig sunk and the survivors in two lifeboats. They're somewhere in the South Atlantic, and things are going to get weird.

Hodgson's model seems to be the works of writers such as Daniel DeFoe, whose Robinson Crusoe stands a sort of Ur-text for all tales of sailors and shipwrecks and strange islands. But Crusoe, while alone, faced nothing so weird as these sailors will face. Their odyssey takes them to a strange island or perhaps continent, unmarked on their maps, where extraordinarily odd plant life exists and menace seems to wait over every hill. They'll soon face storms and another strange continent. They're about to get trapped by a vast assemblage of sea weed. And in and beneath the seaweed, more strange men and monsters. 

The final third of the novel drags a bit as the sailors get stuck in the seaweed and plan to get out while being besieged by weird creatures of the sea and land, pretty much all of them with a whole lot of tentacles waving around. Still, this is a rewarding journey. Hodgson's description of the sailing life rings with authenticity. 

Characters other than the narrator are sketchily constructed; our interest in them instead comes from the horrors they face and their general bravery and resourcefulness in finding ways to escape from the problems they're presented with. The scenes set in the first place they land showcase Hodgson's skill at the creations of disturbing, uncanny landscapes while the later adventures in the land of seaweed focus more upon a sort of literature of grace under weird pressure, much of it expressed by detailed descriptions of the various plans the sailors enact to get home. Highly recommended.

Lovecraft's Book

The World's Greatest Horror Stories (a.k.a. H.P. Lovecraft's Book of Horror): edited by Stephen Jones and Dave Carson (1993/2004) containing the following stories:


Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927/1935) by H. P. Lovecraft: pretty much an essential essay on horror in literature up to the mid-1930's;

The Signalman (1866) by Charles Dickens: understated and almost documentary in its approach, with Dickens striving for an understated realism that works extremely well;

The House and the Brain (1859) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (variant of The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain): haunted house story becomes almost New Age by the end as it moves into occultism and pseudoscience;

The Body Snatcher (1884) by Robert Louis Stevenson: classic and disturbing tale of 'Resurrection Men";

The Spider (1915) by Hanns Heinz Ewers (trans. of Die Spinne 1908): really odd and disturbing tale of suicides caused by... what. exactly?;

The Foot of the Mummy (1882) by Théophile Gautier (trans. of Le Pied de Momie 1840): whimsical dream-journey anticipates similarly themed stories by Dunsany and then Lovecraft ;

The Horla (1886) by Guy de Maupassant (trans. of Le Horla 1887): a really lovely tale of madness and alien invasion by de Maupassant, who was himself suffering from mental illness by the end of his too-short writing career;

The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe: Poe's indispensable tale of rot;

The Damned Thing (1893) by Ambrose Bierce: Bierce's invisible monster in a somewhat slight tale that's not Bierce's best horror story;

The Upper Berth (1885) by F. Marion Crawford: justifiably in the running for Best Ghost Story Ever, a model of suggestion, pay-off, and chilly, water-logged creepiness;

The Yellow Sign (1895) by Robert W. Chambers: Chambers' scariest story helped set the stage for all the mysterious, forbidden volumes to come -- though his forbidden volume, The King in Yellow, is available in finer bookstores everywhere!;

The Shadows on the Wall (1903) by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: a fine ghost story, subtle and concerned with the quicksand of family grudges;

The Dead Valley (1895) by Ralph Adams Cram: Wow! I hadn't read this concise voyage into a very bad place, and it's a doozy;

Fishhead (1913) by Irvin S. Cobb: A weird bit of American regional horror that looks ahead to Lovecraft's own squirmy human/fishmen hybrids;

Lukundoo (1907) by Edward Lucas White: Africa Screams. Not so much scary as inevitable;

The Double Shadow (1933) by Clark Ashton Smith: one of Smith's many, many great dark fantasy stories isn't so much scary as it is disturbing in its description. Smith's wizards were always doing something arrogantly stupid.;

The Mark of the Beast (1890) by Rudyard Kipling: A showcase of Kipling's attention to description of foreign lands (in this case India) and the British men stationed there. As in a lot of his work, the natives are much more sympathetic than many of the British;

 Negotium Perambulans (1922) by E. F. Benson: The description of place here is top-notch, though horror is somewhat absent due to both a sort of inevitable schematicism and a refusal to make the threatened parties sympathetic in any way -- they're really just sorta dumb;

Mrs. Lunt (1926) by Hugh Walpole: OK, this is a really solid ghost story with what seems to be an extraordinarily interesting psychological study of homophobia and masculinity;

The Hog (1915/1947) by William Hope Hodgson: Hodgson's gonzo masterpiece of cosmic forces manifesting as a giant, deadly, spectral hog, with only ghost-finder Carnacki and his crazy-ass ghostbusting technology to oppose that force, at least at first;

The Great God Pan (1894) by Arthur Machen: One of the all-time ten or 20 great horror novellas;

Count Magnus (1904) by M. R. James: Almost all of James' ghost stories are terrific, and this is one of the four or five best, with its mysterious undead Count and its hapless travel-book writer.

The entire anthology: H.P. Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature" covers so much ground that one could easily assemble a dozen different anthologies by following its lead. This is one such anthology, and Jones and Dave Carson (who also illustrates) have done a fine job of mixing much-anthologized necessities with several stories that I haven't seen before (and I've read a bloody awful lot of horror stories). Each story comes with a relevant quotation from Lovecraft's essay, which is also reprinted in its entirety at the beginning of the book. Highly recommended.

Ghosts and Tygers

Carnacki the Ghost-finder: written by William Hope Hodgson, containing the following stories: "The Find", "The Gateway of the Monster", "The Haunted 'Jarvee', "The Hog", "The Horse of the Invisible", "The House Among the Laurels", "The Searcher of the End House", "The Thing Invisible" and "The Whistling Room" (1910-1947; Collected 1974):

One of the earliest recurring paranormal investigators in horror literature, Carnacki remains a delight today, a century after the stories were first written. William Hope Hodgson made him fallible and capable of fear, thus making him a much more interesting protagonist than Algernon Blackwood's nigh-omniscient John Silence or Seabury Quinn's hyper-competent Jules de Grandin.

Science, or at least the appearance of science, plays a big role in Carnacki's investigations. Behold the Electric Pentacle, proof against supernatural powers. Carnacki's theories on what certain supernatural entities actually are give the reader glimpses of the weird world Hodgson has created: the malign, eponymous monster of "The Hog" may look and sound like a giant hog when it manifests on Earth, but it's actually some sort of massive, gaseous enemy from space that's trying to force its way into our world. The cosmic gulfs are haunted by things much worse than ghosts.

There's much quoting from fictional magical texts, and references to the codified and catalogued powers with which Carnacki contends. It all seems about twenty years ahead of its time, Lovecraft before Lovecraft, but with happier outcomes and a more interventionary race of Good Cosmic Beings.

Carnacki tells these tales to a small circle of friends. He refers throughout to his own fears and mistakes, and to his own fallibility. Several of the stories deal with fake hauntings or with explicable events of the natural world which only seem like the supernatural. Throughout, Carnacki marshals science and magic to do his job. Really a fine series of stories. Highly recommended.


　

The Middle of Nowhere by David Gerrold (1995): David Gerrold wrote the beloved original Star Trek episode "The Trouble with Tribbles" and went on to become a writer of some note, periodically working with the Trek franchise again. This novel, the third of his Star Wolf books, originated as ideas for a new Trek during the development of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Set hundreds of years in the future, The Middle of Nowhere tells us Gerrold's second story of the Star Wolf, a military 'liberty ship' of humanity's space fleet. Considered a 'Jonah' because of her inadvertant role in the devastating (for humanity) Battle of Marathon, the ship and her crew now race frantically to find a saboteur on-board so that they can join the fleet in its latest battle with the Morthan Authority.

The Morthans (More-than, get it?) are a genetically, biologically, and technologically engineered off-shoot of humanity that no longer consider themselves human. And they've decided to eradicate humanity. Not all Morthans are down with this plan -- the Star Wolf's security officer is a Morthan 'Tyger' named Brik. But enough are. Humanity may be doomed.

One of Gerrold's points in this and other Star Wolf novels is one that he also made in his non-fiction books on Star Trek. The probable distances involved in space combat should make the whole enterprise resemble submarine warfare. This makes for some tense combat scenes.

Portions of the book don't read like a novel so much as they read like technical sections from a 'Bible' for a TV show that never existed -- we learn an awful lot about the technology of the world of Star Wolf. I enjoyed these sections, but they may be tough, technobabble sledding for some. Recommended.

Short Horrors

Masters of Terror Volume 1: William Hope Hodgson: edited by Peter Tremayne, containing the following stories: "The Voice in the Night", "A Tropical Horror", "The Mystery of the Derelict". "The Terror of the Water-Tank", "The Finding of the Graiken", "The Stone Ship" and "The Derelict" (1905-1914; Collected 1977): This 1970's collection concentrates on early 20th-century horror and science-fiction writer William Hope Hodgson's fantastic tales of the sea. Well, OK, and a water tank. That seems a bit anomalous. But water! His great stories about ghostbuster Carnacki are collected elsewhere.

Hodgson spent years as a sailor before turning to writing, so the tone of the stories rings true even when the events become improbable. Two of the stories deal with the debris and seaweed-choked Sargasso Sea, a location Hodgson would often use for his tales of horror. His fine horror novel The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig' also spends some time there among crabs the size of houses; giant, man-eating octopi; hordes of rats; and an assortment of other awful animals, plants, and dire weather and oceanic conditions.

One of the great lessons learned from these stories and other Hodgson work is that if you're not sure what it is, don't poke it with a stick. And if a 100-ton carnivorous sea-monster invades the deck of your ship, stop running around on the deck.

Besides their dialogic verisimilitude, Hodgson's stories excel in their depiction of the weird and sublime creatures and events on Hodgson's wide and fear-haunted ocean. The finest and most-anthologized stories herein are "The Voice in the Night", a seminal story about a particular type of oopy goopy monster, and "The Derelict", a nice bit of science-fictional horror. Hodgson's major horror stories and novels are well worth seeking out in newer editions than these, or older. Highly recommended.

Monster Mix edited by Robert Arthur containing the following stories: The Day of the Dragon by Guy Endore (1937); Mrs. Amworth (1922) by E. F. Benson; Daniel Webster and the Sea Serpent (1937) by Stephen Vincent Benét; Creature of the Snows by William Sambrot; Aepyornis Island (1894) by H. G. Wells; Fire in the Galley Stove (1937) by William Outerson; The Mannikin (1937) by Robert Bloch; The Wendigo (1910) by Algernon Blackwood; The Derelict (1912) by William Hope Hodgson; O Ugly Bird! (1951) by Manly Wade Wellman; Mimic (1942) by Donald A. Wollheim; The Hoard of the Gibbelins (1911) by Lord Dunsany; and Footsteps Invisible (1940) by Robert Arthur (Collected 1968):

Fun Young Adult-directed horror anthology edited by the prolific writer and editor Robert Arthur, who ghost-wrote a lot of the early Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators novels and ghost-edited a lot of Hitchcock-brand short-story anthologies.

And yes, "Mimic" by Donald A. Wollheim was adapted into the movie of the same name, though the movie has a much different take on the whole affair. Guy Endore, prose source of the 1930's Wolfman movies, could probably have sued the makers of Reign of Fire over his dragon story here. Or his estate could have, anyway.

The monsters in this anthology aren't all bad (the Benet story is comedy, not horror), though most of them are. Algernon Blackwood's "The Wendigo" is one of his two undeniably pivotal novellas (the other being the even-better "The Willows"). While Blackwood wasn't Canadian, many of his horror stories were set in Northern Quebec. It's interesting to see how he reconfigures the Native-American legend of the Wendigo to fit his own fears about the dangerously Sublime wild country of Canada. In its original, the Wendigo story is a cautionary legend about the dangers of greed and gluttony, not about getting spiritually overwhelmed by the wilderness.

Arthur's own story, "Footsteps Invisible," is one of my favourite short stories about Egyptian curses: I'd actually forgotten who'd written it until I read it again here for the first time in thirty years. Recommended.

The Worms Crawl In

The Croning by Laird Barron (2012): Laird Barron has fairly quickly made a name for himself in horror fiction with a unique blend of cosmic horror, graphic depictions of horrific violence, and a constant concern with masculinity and its discontents, satisfactions, and challenges when faced by maggot-like, child-eating horrors from beyond the rim of conventional space-time. Some of Barron's male protagonists (sort of) break even in their confrontations with gibbering, capering, nigh-omnipotent horrors, though generally only through escape or death. Most of them are either destroyed or subverted.

Many of Barron's stories share the same mythology, in which a race of cosmic horrors collectively known as the Children of Old Leech lurk in the lost places of the Earth, spiritually and physically feasting on humans while occasionally offering a small handful of people the "honour" of joining them. Technically speaking, the Leech are both endo- and exocolonists: they conquer from without and within, all in preparation for the day Old Leech itself wakes up hungry and devours the populations of whole planets. Which is what happened to the dinosaurs, among other lost Earth populations.

Yes, he's the feel-good writer of 2012!

The Croning is Barron's first novel, and it's a doozy. For the most part, the narrative follows hapless geologist Don Miller who, in the present day, is in his 80's and plagued by gaps in his memory that, when encountered, his mind scrambles to either explain or forget that such a discovery ever happened (he's even forgotten that he ever knew Spanish well enough to translate Spanish documents).

Don's uncannily young-looking wife of more than 50 years, Michelle Mock, has always pursued the anthropology and archaeology of "lost" tribes, periodically leaving Don for weeks or even months at a time. And as the narrative swings back and forth in time and space, we begin to see why Don's mind is so screwed up -- and why, despite his great love for Michelle, he also occasionally fears her.

The horrors here are indeed horrible, the worst coming from the failures of human morality when confronted by terrible tests. Barron weaves history and mythology and legend (including a crackerjack origin for the story of Rumplestiltskin) into this backwards-and-forwards-looking opus, presents the horrors of the flesh and the soul, and gives us scant light in the face of world-annihilating darkness. It's a brilliant debut, but not for the physically or philosophically squeamish. Highly recommended.

The Wine of Violence

Adrian Ross

The Hole of the Pit by Adrian Ross (1914; reprinted in Uncanny Banquet, 1992):

"Hearken to me, ye that follow after righteousness, ye that seek the LORD: look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged." Isaiah 51:1.

Ramsey Campbell unearthed this hitherto never-reprinted gem of a novel and had it serve as the capstone to his 1992 horror anthology Uncanny Banquet. It is, figuratively and somewhat literally, one hell of a novel. Ross, who primarily wrote librettos for operettas, wrote this one horror novel as a tribute to contemporaneous ghost-story giant M.R. James. Indeed, many of James's stylistic trademarks -- especially a strict attention to suggestion rather than showing, and the framing of the horror within a narrative from the past -- are fully at work here.

However, as Campbell notes in his introduction to the novel, The Hole of the Pit seems more comparable to the horror works of equally contemporaneous William Hope Hodgson, whose monsters and spirits tended to have some sort of quasi-scientific (or at least rationalized supernatural) underpinning. Did Ross read The Ghost Pirates or The Night Land?

But to the novel itself.

The narrator is one Hubert Leyton, a Puritan scholar living during the English Civil War of the 17th century between the Cavaliers (those loyal to the King) and the Roundheads (those loyal to Oliver Cromwell). The narrator abhors violence and has stayed out of the conflict, though he knows Cromwell. A resident of his cousin the Earl of Deeping's lands shows up on his doorstep one day to ask Hubert to attempt to stop the Earl and his men from plundering the supplies of his tenants.

The Earl, a Cavalier, is being pursued by the Roundheads and has taken up residence -- along with several dozen soldiers and one peculiar Italian witch -- in his ancestral home, a castle set on a small island in the midst of a tidal inlet and some pretty treacherous marshes.

Hubert goes in the hope that he can avert further bloodshed. Soon, though, he's captive in his cousin's castle along with the late countess's cousin Rosamund. Actually, everyone's a captive to the tides, the approaching Roundhead force...and something that's come boiling out of 'the Hole', a mysterious underwater cave. Both Hubert and his cousin know that a bit of prophetic doggerel predicts that the Earl of Deeping will be destroyed by some supernatural punishment sent by the Devil. Neither believed such a thing -- until now.

One of Ross's great triumphs here is the first-person characterization of Hubert, who really is a good man, which is not the same thing as being a man without a backbone. Ross manages to make Hubert sympathetic in part by making Hubert sympathetic -- to the criminals and mercenaries fighting alongside the Earl, and to the violent, murderous, but also honourable Earl himself. Hubert is no stranger to violence -- indeed, he's a much better swordsman than anyone else in the Castle, thanks to fencing lessons -- but he abhors it nonetheless, and takes no joy in the deaths that begin to pile up. Because there is something awful stalking the inhabitants of the castle, kept mostly off-screen by Ross.

I don't know how accurate Ross's depiction of the time and place is, but the novel's verisimilitude seems to me to be unassailable. The creature, or thing, or whatever, gains dramatic heft by Ross's parsimony in using it and showing it. Many of its most sinister actions occur unobserved, with only the startling aftermath attesting to its presence and its malevolent powers and intent. All in all, this really is a gem of a historical horror novel. It's a shame Ross didn't write more of them. Highly recommended.