Masters of Terror Volume 1: William Hope Hodgson

by William Hope Hodgson

William Hope Hodgson (1877 - 1918) was probably the greatest writer of horror of the sea who ever lived. He has been described as a writer on whom the mantle of Poe has fallen and no less an authority than H.P. Lovecraft wrote: few can equal him in conveying feelings of the spectral and the abnormal. This volume, the first in the Masters of Terror Series represents the very best of Hodgson's tales of sea horror:

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
The Derelict

Masters of Terror is a series of collections of short stories by those authors who have made their name in the genre of the macabre and supernatural. Each volume is edited by an authority on the author in question and includes an introduction giving details of the author's life and works.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories

156 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

William Hope Hodgson was an English author. He produced a large body of work, consisting of essays, short fiction, and novels, spanning several overlapping genres including horror, fantastic fiction, and science fiction. Early in his writing career he dedicated effort to poetry, although few of his poems were published during his lifetime. He also attracted some notice as a photographer and achieved some renown as a bodybuilder. Hodgson served with the British Army durng World War One. He died, at age 40, at Ypres, killed by German artillery fire.

Reviews

[Leila Anani · Rating 4 out of 5]

William Hope Hodgson has to be one of the most underrated writers ever. He's up there with Lovecraft, H.G. Wells and Poe and yet nobody's ever heard of him. After being given this anthology last week, I hightailed it to my local library to find that in the entire county there are only 4 of his works currently in circulation and two of those are probably missing. Shameful!!!!

This anthology comprises of 7 short stories all connected with horrors of the deep - 6 are actually set at sea and one deals with something nasty in a water tank. Having served in the Navy Hodgson's experiences give his sea tales a wonderful sense of realism which is a wonderful balance to the uncanny bent they take.

Love Lovecraft's Dagon? Look no further, here we have tentacle monsters, stone ships with statues where the hair continues to grow, killer seaweed...

The stories are a tad similar, but I loved all of them and found them far less verbose and clunky than Lovecraft's turgid prose whilst at the same time having the same unsettling feeling and freaky epic mythos.

Highly Recommended.

[Norm · Rating 4 out of 5]

This little gem of a book introduces the reader to William Hope Hodgson, who was highly praised by H.P. Lovecraft in his "Supernatural Horror in Literature".

All but one of the stories in this volume takes place on the high seas, with a first-person narrator (who, though a different character in each story, seems like one person, maybe Hodgson himself) leading the reader into the heart of the salty unknown. The narrator is generally an intelligent, likeable, "regular guy", who, along with his fellow ship-mates, encounters yet another mysterious - and sometimes deadly - denizen of the deep.

Hodgson was a gifted short story writer who spent 8 years at sea, so he is in his element, in these pages. I once read that the single most important characteristic of a work of fiction is that it must be written so vividly, that readers feel they are taking part in the story. In my opinion, Hodgson achieves this effect about as well as any writer I know.

In these stories, Hodgson also makes terrific use of the senses. Sights, sounds and smells, both natural and "unnatural", enhance and heighten the eerie, wondrous and horrible events. These stories may seem "old-fashioned" in some ways (they were written a hundred years ago, or more), since the characters are reflective and basically decent but they are also hearty men of action. The prose is simple and straight-forward and free of any tiresome literary affectations (no dialogue minus quotations or 2-page paragraphs, here) and that makes me like them even more.

If you haven't tried Hodgson, I strongly recommend him. Newer editions of his stories (and novels) are available. Some of these newer collections contain the same stories in this volume, as well as others.


Note: Even though this collection is listed as Volume 1 in the "Masters of Terror" series, I don't think any other volumes were ever published, which is a shame. The editor, Peter Tremayne, provides an illuminating introduction and I would welcome any more volumes under his editorship. This is a nice introduction to a great writer of weird fiction, one who should not be forgotten.

[Fraser Sherman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This suffers slightly from several stories being a little too repetitive — ship sights derelict, investigates, bad things happen. That said, Hodgson whips up some impressively chilling horrors, whether it's the sea serpent of "A Tropical Horror," the rats of the Sargasso Sea or the monstrous fungal threat of "The Derelict." I'm glad I reread this one.