William Hope Hodgson

Hodgson ran away to sea at the age of thirteen and eventually served in the Merchant Marine. After a failed business venture he decided to support himself by writing. His early works, The Voice in the Night and The Boats of the Glenn Carrig, were based on his experiences at sea.

Hodgson's works are chiefly of the 'occult' or 'horror' modes. Despite his often-labored and clumsy language, there is a critical consensus that he achieves a deep power of expression, which focusses 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, referred to by H. P. Lovecraft as "a classic of the first water", and The Night Land, a somber vision of a sunless far-future world. He also created the "detective of the occult" Thomas Carnacki, who appeared in several short stories.

Hodgson was killed at Ypres in 1918.

Works

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

External Links

• Online editions
• William Hope Hodgson
• Dani Zweig's Belated Reviews
• Supernatural Detectives
• Thomas Carnacki
• The Night Land
• H. P. Lovecraft on Hodgson
• William Hope Hodgson: as a fantasy author

Referenced By