Weird Fiction discussion

I will have much to say about this wonderful Weird fiction pioneer one day. This message is simply to let people know I found a copy of his first published work, "The Goddess of Death" (1904) free to read online here: http://woolrich3.tripod.com/death.htm

Thanks for sharing that, Dan. It's a good one.

An enjoyable read, typical of the genre. I particularly liked the ending as it wasn't what I anticipated.

Me neither. Strictly speaking this story isn't in the Weird genre. In the nineteenth century stories like these could end one of two ways. It could be supernatural all the way through with no explanation offered. These were typically written for children and were called ghost stories, or if they were a bit more sophisticated, Gothic horror. The other way they could end was with some rational explanation for everything that transpired, revealed only at the end, like this one and every Scooby Doo mystery cartoon you've ever seen.

Weird fiction has more in common with Gothic horror and is a development from it with the added twists that the supernatural element of the story is less explained, more mysterious, and comes from a world or system of supernatural behind it, often hidden. Weird is never just a one-off, isolated incident as a ghost story is.

I agree: it's fun to read Hodgson before he really became Hodgson.

You certainly know your stuff! I'm still getting to know the sub-genre classes. It's funny because I gave it little consideration really when I wrote my own collection . The supernatural elements in mine are also hidden in the main. Some readers have really liked that, but one or two commented that they wanted to know the precise causes/outcomes. I wonder if it's to do with our modern culture wanting to be given everything rather than use their own imagination, interpretation and inference ? It's an interesting thought.

I think you're in the right place then Catherine. We Weird lovers DO NOT need to know everything about what's going on behind the scenes. That said, we do expect the author to know. Or at least to know enough so we can't tell if she (or he) doesn't know everything. That means everything presented has to be consistent with everything else presented.

I think most of us really don't like stories where the supernatural elements are revealed to have a logical cause at the end. There's something so contrived in that, and leaves a feeling of having been cheated or misled. I'm thinking people expressed the same dissatisfaction to Hope himself. Or, equally likely, his own aesthetic sense developed, and he stopped doing that after his first story.

At least, the second story he ever published, "A Tropical Horror" (1905) didn't have that same type of ending. I read the story last month because it was in the Summer 1973 issue of Weird Tales I've been promoting we all read.

It starts out, "We are a hundred and thirty days out from Melbourne, and for three weeks we have lain in this sweltering calm." This is really coincidental because the same thing happened in the middle of the first part of last month's book (The Other Side of the Mountain).

I found a good, free online source, this time without typos, for Hodgson's second story. I don't like his second story as much as the first, despite myself having once been a sailor too. I imagine the second story's relative weakness may be why it was never published again after 1905 until 68 years later in the Summer of 1973, but if you're interested here it is: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Trop...

Strangely, William Hope Hodgson does not feature in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. Over a hundred other authors do, but not Hodgson.

Lovecraft devoted three pages in his 95-page work, Supernatural Horror in Literature, to Hodgson:

Of rather uneven stylistic quality, but vast occasional power in its suggestion of lurking worlds and beings behind the ordinary surface of life, is the work of William Hope Hodgson, known today far less than it deserves to be. Despite a tendency toward conventionally sentimental conceptions of the universe, and of man's relation to it and to his fellows, Mr. Hodgson is perhaps second only to Algernon Blackwood in his serious treatment of unreality. Few can equal him in adumbrating the nearness of nameless forces and monstrous besieging entities through casual hints and insignificant details, or in conveying feelings of the spectral and the abnormal in connection with regions or buildings.

In The Boats of the Glen Carrig (1907) we are shown a variety of malign marvels and accursed unknown lands as encountered by the survivors of a sunken ship. The brooding menace in the earlier parts of the book is impossible to surpass, though a letdown in the direction of ordinary romance and adventure occurs toward the end. An inaccurate and pseudo-romantic attempt to reproduce eighteenth-century prose detracts from the general effect, but the really profound nautical erudition everywhere displayed is a compensating factor.

The House on the Borderland (1908) -- perhaps the greatest of all Mr. Hodgson's works -- tells of a lonely and evilly regarded house in Ireland which forms a focus for hideous otherworld forces and sustains a siege by blasphemous hybrid anomalies from a hidden abyss below. The wanderings of the Narrator's spirit through limitless light-years of cosmic space and Kalpas of eternity, and its witnessing of the solar system's final destruction, constitute something almost unique in standard literature. And everywhere there is manifest the author's power to suggest vague, ambushed horrors in natural scenery. But for a few touches of commonplace sentimentality this book would be a classic of the first water.

The Ghost Pirates (1909), regarded by Mr. Hodgson as rounding out a trilogy with the two previously mentioned works, is a powerful account of a doomed and haunted ship on its last voyage, and of the terrible sea-devils (of quasi-human aspect, and perhaps the spirits of bygone buccaneers) that besiege it and finally drag it down to an unknown fate. With its command of maritime knowledge, and its clever selection of hints and incidents suggestive of latent horrors in nature, this book at times reaches enviable peaks of power.

The Night Land (1912) is a long-extended (538 pp.) tale of the earth's infinitely remote future-billions of billions of years ahead, after the death of the sun. It is told in a rather clumsy fashion, as the dreams of a man in the seventeenth century, whose mind merges with its own future incarnation; and is seriously marred by painful verboseness, repetitiousness, artificial and nauseously sticky romantic sentimentality, and an attempt at archaic language even more grotesque and absurd than that in Glen Carrig.

Allowing for all its faults, it is yet one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written. The picture of a night-black, dead planet, with the remains of the human race concentrated in a stupendously vast mental pyramid and besieged by monstrous, hybrid, and altogether unknown forces of the darkness, is something that no reader can ever forget: Shapes and entities of an altogether non-human and inconceivable sort -- the prowlers of the black, man-forsaken, and unexplored world outside the pyramid -- are suggested and partly described with ineffable potency; while the night-land landscape with its chasms and slopes and dying volcanism takes on an almost sentient terror beneath the author's touch.

Midway in the book the central figure ventures outside the pyramid on a quest through death-haunted realms untrod by man for millions of years -- and in his slow, minutely described, day-by-day progress over unthinkable leagues of immemorial blackness there is a sense of cosmic alienage, breathless mystery, and terrified expectancy unrivalled in the whole range of literature. The last quarter of the book drags woefully, but fails to spoil the tremendous power of the whole. Mr. Hodgson's later volume, Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, consists of several longish short stories published many years before in magazines. In quality it falls conspicuously below the level of the other books. We here find a more or less conventional stock figure of the "infallible detective" type -- the progeny of M. Dupin and Sherlock Holmes, and the close kin of Algernon Blackwood's John Silence -- moving through scenes and events badly marred by an atmosphere of professional "occultism." A few of the episodes, however, are of undeniable power, and afford glimpses of the peculiar genius characteristic of the author.

Hodgson's third story, "The Valley of Lost Children," was published in another obscure periodical: The Cornhill Magazine (February 1906). I give the first story (above) four stars, the second three because it was too simple in plot, though interesting. In this third story, which I give four stars again, Hodgson writes like a pro. He is using vernacular well in his dialogue, and has complicated characters grieving the loss of their five-year-old son.

This is the first story I would say is full blown Weird because it has a (probably) malevolent world that is not fully explained working in the background. Warning: child death and reading of parental grief, even if as well and tastefully done as here, can be hard on some. It was on me. Not recommended for all readers.

Baen, of all publishers, makes it available for free: https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781597...

Re..."I think most of us really don't like stories where the supernatural elements are revealed to have a logical cause at the end. There's something so contrived in that, and leaves a feeling of having been cheated or misled." Absolutely agree!
Re the above story -undoubtedly quite sentimental, but it was almost bound to be because of the topic. The ending of this one was more easily inferred as the story unfolded. I found it quite tender, yet as you say, the supposed malevolent world adds a darker element.

So far I have discussed and provided links to Hodgson's three earliest published stories. His fourth story, titled "From the Tideless Sea," was published in the April 1906 issue of The Monthly Story Magazine. I found it here: https://williamhopehodgson.wordpress....

1907 was a very productive year for Hodgson. He published his first novel: The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig' (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10542) and an excerpt from it as a short story. He also continued his Sargasso Sea series begun the previous year with "From the Tideless Sea" by writing two sequel short stories: "The Mystery of the Derelict" and "More News from the Homebird." Besides this, he published three more short stories: "The Weed Men," "The Terror of the Water-Tank," and "The Voice in the Night."

I am skipping all these for now (but will come back to them later) in order to move on to Hodgson's second and most famous novel, The House on the Borderland, (1908) this month's group read which I'm starting today. Besides publishing this novel in 1908, Hodgson also published two short stories and an essay as well. More on them later.