John Linwood Grant writes occult detective and dark fantasy stories, in between running his beloved lurchers and baking far too many kinds of bread. Apart from that, he enjoys growing unusual fruit and reading rejection slips. He is six foot tall, ageing at an alarming rate, and has his own beard.
As you know, dear listeners, greydogtales is all about the strange, from the mysterious world of longdogs and lurchers to the often less surprising world of weird art and fiction. In the run up to the Winter Solstice, we will have something for everyone (except extremely timid cat owners, perhaps).
Weird art will feature heavily in the next month or two, though fear not, lurchers and writers will not be forgotten. Descending to the “I” that is J Linseed Grant for a moment, I am delighted to open today with this highly appropriate illustration by Robyn Molyneaux. Robyn is a talented young Australian artist, and I hope to have more of her work to display in due course:
robyn molyneaux
Having a planned programme is always a disastrous move, but over the next six or seven weeks we (that’s the entire greydogtales staff, including Django) hope to have illustrated main features on the following artists/creators, in a rather random order:
John Coulthart. John has been producing the most amazingly detailed illustrative work for some years, including Lovecraftian pieces such as those in his book, the redesigned The Haunter of the Dark. He tells us that he will soon be working on an illustrated edition of The House on the Borderland.
john coulthart
Raphael Ordonez. Raphael is both a writer and an artist with whom we came into contact over his interest in William Hope Hodgson. He says that some of his fiction is influenced by Hodgson, and his artistic work includes both unsettling paintings and naturalistic images.
raphael ordonez
M Wayne Miller. Wayne is well known in weird fiction circles for the striking illustrations which adorn many novels and collections, including his cover art for Willie Meikle, interviewed by greydogtales a couple of weeks ago.
m wayne miller
Mansfield Dark, also known as Richard and Daniel Mansfield, is a UK team which produces disturbing short films and images, including some fascinating shadow puppetry and silhouette animation. Recent work includes a version of the M R James story Count Magnus.
mansfield dark
Sebastian Cabrol. This talented Argentinian artist and illustrator is already familiar to greydogtales followers for his work illustrating editions of The Night Land and The House on the Borderland. We also have a commentary from Diego Arandojo, comic writer, film-maker and editor, on working with Sebastian.
sebastian cabrol
We will be keeping it varied with more longdog posts, such as a feature on Lurcher SOS Sighthound Rescue, a centre in the South (we can’t all be perfect) of England, to show the sort of work which is needed. If you didn’t know, every one of our own dogs has been a rescue dog since 1982. See, we were young once!
And amongst other goodies, we hope to have an interview with the author James Stoddard, mentioned in the Hodgson tribute month as the author of The Night Land: A Story Retold, but also the author of fantasy books such as The High House and The False House.
Finally, a snippet which is too good to miss, given its title. You might remember a post a month or so ago, Game of Groans and Clanking Chains, which introduced some ghostly Yorkshire dogs.
This August Nick Stone, a photographer from Norfolk, started a Public Archaeology Project called Black Dog Tales: Mapping the Grim and Other Stories. His website includes a wealth of information about the various incarnations of demon and spirit dogs, and is highly recommended. Nick and others write about many aspects of the grim, and new material is still being added – and welcomed, we understand. His site can be found here:
As Jane Austen wrote in her early draft of Lurch and Lurchability, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a gardener in possession of a good longdog, must be in want of his wits.”
Sadly, Ms Austen was later converted to spaniels by an over-amorous curate from Tiverton, and wrote no more on the subject of the lurcher or the longdog. She didn’t say much more about gardening either. So it falls to greydogtales to expose the sordid truth about trying have a lurcher and a garden at the same time. This third section of Lurchers for Beginners is drawn from painful experience, dear listeners, and therefore not a Laughing Matter.
courtesy of Lord Graham
The typical lurcher is a long-legged, light-footed beast, able to dance nimbly between two of the feathers on an angel’s wings and turn on a pinhead. Clearly the ideal companion for the keen gardener. Oh dear. Only we will tell you the truth…
Some of you, no doubt, will have that gentle creature who trots straight down the garden path, has an inconspicuous pee and returns to sit quietly at your feet. We at greydogtales have not yet met this sub-species. Many lurchers consider the garden to be a place for army manoeuvres and major earth-moving projects. For those of you who are in doubt, let us examine some of the main components of a garden – and their fate…
THE LAWN
Also know as the Main Runway. It is used for take-off attempts, such as squirrel catching, fence jumping and flying after the neighbour’s cat. It also makes a nice arena for chasey-chasey and bitey-face, which are sadly not yet Olympic sports. Typically the suburban dog lawn consists of three parts:
A trodden wasteland of bare earth. This is a cracked, dry dust-bowl in Summer, and a lethal mud-slide in Winter.
A stretch of sad, desperate grass which has gone brown or yellow due to frequent use as a toilet, even though you spent all year watering it straight after the dogs, or trying tomato ketchup and so on in their diet.
A tiny bit of surviving green grass, slightly smaller than a garden chair, which will be noticed by your lurchers any day now.
a typical lurcher owner’s lawn
There are solutions, of course:
Re-turf (and/or re-seed) the lawn twice a year until you get bored – or run out of money.
Cover everything with Astroturf. Don’t stop at the garden, put it all through the house as well. It may well last longer than your carpets.
Abandon all your lawn-related dreams and convert the mower into a lurcher-pulled sled for those trips to the local shops.
FLOWER BEDS
Surprisingly, you can have flower-beds. Sometimes. These should be placed after you find out where the main runways lie, and compensate for cat entry-points, where neighbours’ children poke grubby faces through the hedge etc. Plants that are particularly suitable for lurcher flowerbeds include:
Lichen and algae
That indestructible grass you find on dunes at the seaside
Mature holly bushes
A swathe of prairie-style planting may seem durable and appealing. Do note that any particularly expensive fancy grasses will be mysteriously chosen as prime fodder, despite there being common grass all around.
You can also plant pretty, delicate flowers, but don’t come crying to me.
Tubs and planters are an excellent alternative, unless you have a male dog like Django, who likes to wander round the patio peeing on everything in a pot to make sure it’s his. What remains is a display of patio plants which are all strangely brown down one side.
Raised beds make excellent sunbathing stations for the lurcher who likes a tan. They are also prone to being undermined by urgent digging activities. Always make your raised bed foundations from deep, industrial-strength concrete or pure granite bedrock to avoid this problem.
escape from Stalag Longdog (courtesy of Django)
WATER FEATURES
Water-features are popular. They are useful for drinking from when they’ve knocked the bowl in the house over and soaked the carpet. The larger ones, such as ponds, are ideal for i) accidental baths (damn, missed that cat) and ii) standing in to cool down sore or over-heated paws. This usually involves destroying all your hard work arranging marginals, shallow-ledge plants and water-lilies in tasteful perfection. A passing hippopotamus would do less damage.
Both i) and ii) have an added attraction. They allow the lurcher to come back inside and adorn the entire house with wet and muddy footprints, duckweed, and that delicate pond-plant you paid too much for at the garden centre.
Note that ponds are a Questionable Thing. greydogtales is always on the alert for risks, as we have enough already. Some authorities (and some normal people) consider that pond water, especially if it is still and laden with muck/bacteria, is not a Good Idea. A clean, circulating-water pond is probably safer. Note also that certain lurchers will automatically head for the most disgusting, toxic water-source they can find anyway…
TREES
Trees are simply Satan’s Highway, used by the squirrel army to avoid direct combat, hide their ill-gotten supplies and generally taunt the innocent lurcher (see earlier post Lurcher v Squirrel: The Battle of Dork’s Drift). They are also an occasional transport route for cats, who are surprisingly close allies of the squirrels when it comes to lurcher abuse. Trees have only two other purposes:
To be peed on
To be run into
The latter may only apply to our longdog Django, who is skilled at looking over his shoulder whilst running and immediately crashing into various tree-shaped obstacles.
BOUNDARIES
High, thick conifer hedges re-inforced with heavy-grade green mesh work very well. As do eight foot high concrete walls. The lurcher is a peculiar animal. Some will leap six foot, others will show no interest whatsoever. They will not tell you which one they are, which is annoying.
If in doubt, put sturdy fencing panels everywhere. Everywhere. It’s even useful at the top and bottom of the stairs, around your bed and in front of the fridge.
If in further doubt, put smooth-topped trellis on top of everything. Note:Never put anything pointy on top of boundaries – this will produce either vet bills or a collapsed fence. Or both.
a standard suburban dog-proof boundary
As lurchers may well come in from the garden hungry and investigate the kitchen, it might be wise to put more trellis around the stove top and the work surfaces, as well. After all, they didn’t pay for that steak.
It has occasionally been fashionable to create a stylish sunken garden. Frankly, this is what you usually get if you have too many lurchers. Why pay a landscape gardener?
IN CONCLUSION
There is no conclusion. The war between lurchers and gardeners is an endless struggle. The only victor is that nice, smiling woman who runs the nearest garden centre, and who always seems so very pleased to see you again…
Next time: Probably something weird and horrible to balance the books…
It’s All Hallow’s Eve, and we’re down to the dying embers of our conflagration, our month-long tribute to William Hope Hodgson. Just as the daoine sídhe can enter this world more easily at Samhain, so can the longdogs begin to lurch back into the world of greydogtales. The last week has been mainly about critical views and oddities, so we leave you with a melange of memorials and myth-enforcing minutiae. That’s writer-talk for the bits that couldn’t be fitted in before.
But before we place a few trivia on the fire, we must thank our ancestors and point out that our blogfest has been made wondrous, and indeed possible, by the contributions of the following authors, artists and enthusiasts, to whom we are indebted:
Sam Gafford, Willie Meikle, Tim Prasil, James Bojaciuk, Julia Morgan, Chico Kidd, David Langford, Sebastián Cabrol, Kate Coady, Georges Dodds, J Patrick Allen, John C Wright, Wayne June and Django the longdog (Chilli and Twiglet were asleep for most of it).
Of course, if you enjoyed the month, then I’ll take as much credit as I can get as well. I’m not proud.
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In this last Hodgson entry, I’ve picked a few unconnected critical quotes quite deliberately, to illustrate the way in which his reputation lived on (and I’ve thrown in a word or two of my own).
Our first quote comes from a friend of Hodgson’s, one who went to great lengths to continue publishing and promoting Hodgson after his death. Arthur St. John Adcock was a journalist, poet and later editor of The Bookman, a magazine of publication news and reviews. For those of a weird or ghostly bent, Gertrude Atherton, W B Yeats and M R James were among its contributors. In fact, James wrote his article ‘Some Remarks on Ghost Stories’ for the December 1929 edition of The Bookman.
by Walter Benington, for Elliott & Fry, chlorobromide print, 1920s
Adcock was steadfast in his support for a number of years, support which might be summarised in this from The Bookman (1920):
“…In (his) three novels, in The Night Land, and in some of his short stories, he showed a mastery of the bizarre, the mysterious, the terrible that has not often been equalised outside the pages of Edgar Allan Poe.”
More on Adcock and Hodgson can be found in Sam Gafford‘s WHH site, through the link given yesterday.
For a more contemporary view, the author China Mieville, in his essay M R James and the Quantum Vampire (Collapse, 2008):
“A good case can be made, for example, that William Hope Hodgson, though considerably less influential than Lovecraft, is as, or even more, remarkable a Weird visionary; and that 1928 can be considered the Weird tentacle’s coming of age, Cthulhu (‘monster […] with an octopus-like head’) a twenty-first birthday iteration of the giant ‘devil-fish’ – octopus – first born to our sight squatting malevolently on a wreck in Hodgson’s The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’, in 1907.”
I was interested, re-reading Mieville’s essay, to be reminded of his take on M R James’s ghosts. I recently mentioned elsewhere that the Hodgson collection Carnacki the Ghostfinder has virtually no ghosts in it, and that the title is therefore somewhat misleading. Mieville points out that M R James’s own ‘ghosts’ are for the most part actually unnatural creatures, be they demons, poisonous spider-things, slinking remnants or whatever.
Ab-natural, as Hodgson might say, but not ghosts. It seems to me that although the writing is so temperamentally and stylistically different, many of the antiquary’s terrors and the psychic detective’s monsters have aspects in common. And, of course, they are of a time. Hodgson’s The Whistling Room was published in 1910, James’s More Ghost Stories in 1911. Sadly, I fear that given James’s views on the “overtly occult” in ghost stories, M R would not greatly have appreciated Carnacki.
And for my third record, Sue, I wanted to include a comment by T E Grau, author of weird fiction and the recent collection The Nameless Dark. In his enjoyable Cosmicomicon blog essay on Hodgson (2011), Grau posed a question:
“Lovecraft is always cited as the Father of Cosmic Horror. So, would that make William Hope Hodgson the Grandfather of the same?”
His final answer is:
“Perhaps the weighty title “Grandfather of Cosmic Horror” is too generous, but certainly Grand Uncle isn’t too far off the mark. This inspired and talented innovator deserves a prominent spot, and his share of the cake, at the grown ups’ table.”
We’re about done. There is so much that we haven’t covered, but it’s time to wrap it up. I did consider quoting some of Hodgson’s poetry, but much of it is long and frankly rather depressing. It dwells overly on death and insignificance. Had I known the old chap, I would have probably told him to get a dog, take long country walks and drink more pale ale with a few mates. So I’ll leave the poetry for the die-hards and the curious to explore.
Instead, another audio link, to three audiobooks published by Blackstone Audio. David Ian Davies narrates The Whistling Room, The Thing Invisible and The Haunted Jarvee, all jolly good Carnacki stories.
And so I leave you, brave souls that you have been, with a thought from my notorious work, now banned on three continents, Sandra’s First Pony. In the words of Mr Bubbles, not long after the appalling and bloody events at the Knaresborough Gymkhana:
“You call that a Hog? I call it time to make sausages…”
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Oh, and my vignette Chicago was just picked as one of the top free horror stories this October by The Parlor of Horror blog. Which is nice.
We are in monstrous waters. This is the second penultimate post in our month-long tribute to William Hope Hodgson, which is patently impossible. As was the idea of celebrating Hodgson’s work in only one month. I am clearly an appalling editor, a slipshod writer and an idiot. Hurrah! Internet fame surely beckons…
So, my dear, dear listeners, please keep tuned to this wavelength a little longer. We have one post today, our feature interview with noted WHH critic and editor Sam Gafford, and another post tomorrow, packing in the last few oddities and trivia.
Speaking of trivia, something discovered whilst reading a commentary by Sam Moscowitz (mentioned later below). One of Hodgson’s short sea stories, Ships that Go Missing, was first published in March 1920 in The Premier magazine, with a cover illustrating a ship foundering in heavy seas. The cover illo was signed ‘Marny’.
That caught my attention because Paul Marny was an Anglo-French artist who lived in Scarborough, on the coast where I was raised, until he died in 1914. He painted many harbour and seascapes, including The Loss of the Scarborough Lifeboat, a famous local incident, and a number of stormy sea pieces. Is it feasible that The Premier copied a Marny print to illustrate Hodgson? If so it would be very fitting.
Paul Marny
It’s also fitting that our last feature interview of the WHH tribute should be with the talented Sam Gafford, who has done so much to enhance Hodgson’s reputation as a writer and to shine a clear, critical light on Hodgson’s work. In early September of this year I contacted him suggesting that we might link up “for a couple of key posts specifically on support for WHH’s work and legacy.” He was enthusiastic, and it grew from there.
It’s fair to say that without Sam’s involvement, I might never have devoted so much of my remaining lifespan to this terrifying endeavour. My longdogs would have had more walks, my spine would be in better shape and I might have written a number of astoundingly well-crafted short stories in that time (this is my eleventh Hodgson post this month, if you haven’t caught my sarcastic tone yet). But hey, no-one’s playing the blame game. So now we turn to the guilty party himself.
a possible sighting of the rare gafford
greydog: Welcome, Sam. We really ought to start by highlighting your own place in the Hodgson universe. Let’s face it, you are an authority on William Hope Hodgson. How the heck did that come about?
Gafford: Well, I first became aware of Hodgson probably back around 1980 or so when I first read Lovecraft’s essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”, in the Arkham House edition of DAGON. As practically everyone knows, that essay is essentially a laundry list of great writers and Hodgson was one that really intrigued me. I’ve always had an interest in horror and in tales of the sea (which is ironic as I have a near pathological fear of the sea as well and will not go out on boats and almost never more than a foot or two in the ocean from the beach) so I decided to try and track down some of his work.
Now, back in 1980, this wasn’t particularly easy to do. There was no internet back then and Hodgson wasn’t an author that you could find in the bookstore either. Luckily, about this time, Sphere Books in England reprinted all four of Hodgson’s novels as well as the Carnacki stories so I snapped those up immediately. Once I started reading, I was hooked! (No pun intended.) Hodgson was unlike any writer I’d ever read before and I made it a mission to find as much of his work as I could which led me to doing research and writing about both the man and his works.
Unlike Lovecraft, there hasn’t been a tremendous amount of scholarly work done on Hodgson and I’ve tried to help change that. My goal has always been to get Hodgson’s work to as many readers as possible and, from there, to encourage and support Hodgsonian research. Through the years there have been some very talented individuals who have done work on Hodgson. Sam Moskowitz provided much of the early scholarship and edited three volumes of Hodgson’s then ‘lost’ works for Donald M. Grant who published them in very handsome editions. Moskowitz’s work, along with articles by Randy Everts, were the foundation upon which much later research was built.
Jane Frank made an outstanding contribution when she edited two volumes for PS Publishing/Tartarus Press which included a volume of poetry and another collection of ‘lost’ material. She also included a masterful critical and biographical essay in the latter. Other writers/editors like Douglas Anderson, Ian Bell, Mark Valentine and Mike Ashley have been hugely important in keeping Hodgson’s name and works alive.
Andy Robertson’s website devoted to Hodgson’s THE NIGHT LAND deserves especial mention. Andy helped bring Hodgson into the modern computer age and created a community of readers and fans who discussed Hodgson and his masterful novel. Much of the credit for Hodgson’s online identity is owed to Andy who, sadly, passed away not long ago. But what is amazing is that what Andy created with his website has refused to die! Through the determination of people like Kate Coady and Brett Davidson, THE NIGHT LAND website has been brought back online and continues to serve as a forum for study, criticism and new fiction. I cannot praise them all enough for continuing Andy’s legacy.
I’ve written numerous articles about Hodgson but the one thing of which I am most proud is the publication last year of WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON: VOICES FROM THE BORDERLAND—Seven Decades of Criticism on the Master of Cosmic Horror which I co-edited with S.T. Joshi and Massimo Berruti (Hippocampus Press). In this book, we worked to bring together many of the notable critical articles that have appeared over the decades (many hard to find now) along with new articles from many of the people I mentioned above. About a third of the book is the comprehensive bibliography that S.T. Joshi, Mike Ashley and I compiled (with the help of dozens of other scholars) which show the length and breadth of Hodgson’s many achievements. It is my sincere hope that this book will inspire others to both read and write about Hodgson in the years to come.
greydog: We have little doubt of that. You mention S T Joshi, who has of course written extensively on Lovecraft, and we know that H P Lovecraft was critically aware of Hodgson’s work. Do you detect any WHH influences in Lovecraft’s own fiction?
Gafford: That’s a tough question. We know that HPL didn’t read Hodgson’s novels until 1934 when his friend, H. C. Koenig, loaned him the books. Sadly, much of Lovecraft’s peak creative work was behind him at that time. Lovecraft, near as we can tell, never read Hodgson’s sea-horror short stories and certainly never read “The Hog” which was unpublished in Lovecraft’s lifetime. Despite the fact that both authors shared many similarities in their work (their sense of cosmic horror and man’s insignificance in the universe, for example), we can’t really say that Hodgson influenced Lovecraft to any great degree before 1934. But, because of their similarities, we can easily see why Lovecraft was so taken with Hodgson to the point where he revised his essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”, to include his new discovery. (Ironically, Lovecraft had read CARNACKI, THE GHOST-FINDER a few years earlier and did not care for it which may explain why he came to Hodgson so late.)
After that point, Lovecraft only wrote two significant stories and those were “The Shadow Out of Time” and “The Haunter in the Dark”. I don’t think that we can see much of Hodgson in the latter story but John D. Haefele made a masterful case for Hodgson having influenced the former tale. After reading Haefele’s article, I am inclined to agree that Lovecraft revised some of his concepts for the story after reading Hodgson and, in particular, THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND.
(Side note, Haefele’s article is included in WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON: VOICES FROM THE BORDERLAND—Seven Decades of Criticism on the Master of Cosmic Horror and is recommended reading for fans of both Lovecraft and Hodgson.)
greydog:Let’s poke a stick at Hodgson’s extraordinary book, The Night Land, which Lovecraft described as “one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination every written”. The Night Land is an astonishingly original work, but marred by Hodgson’s deliberate use of archaic language. Why do you think he made such an odd choice?
Gafford: It’s hard to say. We don’t have very many primary sources from Hodgson and barely a handful of letters. I still believe that this lack of material is the single biggest handicap to doing scholarly work on Hodgson. Unless a pile of letters suddenly appear one day (which I doubt will happen by this point), we’ll likely never know what Hodgson thought or felt or why he made the writing decisions he did.
Despite this, I do have a few of my own ideas as to why he chose that style. In my article, “Writing Backwards: The Novels of William Hope Hodgson”, I used a small cache of then-recently discovered letters from Hodgson to prove that his novels were written in the reverse order in which they were published. This means that he wrote THE NIGHT LAND first and THE BOATS OF THE ‘GLEN CARRIG’ last. This is supremely important when we look at his development as a writer.
THE NIGHT LAND, for all its faults, is generally considered to be Hodgson’s masterpiece. Previously, we would have looked at that as the pinnacle of his career as a novelist and that his other novels led up to this mammoth saga. But that is not true. THE NIGHT LAND was written first and, when it failed to sell to a publisher, Hodgson felt the need to change his style and themes to the more pedestrian ‘adventure’ style of THE BOATS OF THE ‘GLEN CARRIG’. This inexperience could explain some of the odd choices Hodgson made with his first novel.
In Hodgson’s mind, THE NIGHT LAND is a romance. He even subtitles it “A Love Tale”. So it’s my contention that he tried to imitate what he thought was the right language which we see in works like ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS (known commonly as THE ARABIAN NIGHTS). We see much of the same language here but, sadly, Hodgson is not up to the task of recreating that style and it often works against him in his text. There has also been discussion of the possibility that Hodgson was attempting to duplicate the style of the Bible and specifically the King James Version. I think that this idea has some merit. We must remember that Hodgson’s father was a Priest in the Anglican Church and that both of his parents were deeply involved in missionary work. It is entirely conceivable that Hodgson could have had this in mind as well after a lifetime exposed to the Bible and its language.
What is clear is that this was a poor decision. Made, I believe, through his inexperience and probable lack of his own personal voice. He had the imagery, he knew the landscape, but he could not describe it yet and so tried to emulate something that, to his mind, was appropriate to the story. I leave it to the readers to decide if that was the correct choice.
greydog: We haven’t really done justice to all of Hodgson’s output this month. Tell us something about Captain Gault, skipper for hire, for those who have only read WHH’s horror stories.
Gafford: Ah, I am so happy you asked about Gault! So few seem to know this character or have read his exploits. There are times when I enjoy Gault stories even more than Canacki!
Hodgson knew that the key to repeated sales to magazines depended upon the use of serial characters like Sherlock Holmes. They created an audience and could be counted on for regular paychecks. However, Hodgson’s characters never really caught on that well. After Carnacki, Hodgson had his biggest success with his Captain Gault stories and they are radically different.
courtesy of Sam’s website
Captain Gault, unusual for Hodgson’s characters, is contemporary for the times in which he was written. The first Gault story appeared in 1914 and there is evidence that Hodgson was still writing them up until 1917 or so. Gault is the unscrupulous captain of a steamship and his primary goal is smuggling contraband and outsmarting customs officials. The way in which he does this is in the stories is often quite ingenious and gives the stories much of their ‘cat and mouse’ flavor.
However, it is the character of Gault himself that is the most interesting. Hodgson is often criticized for not creating the best characters and this is mostly true. In many of his early stories, the characters are either one dimensional or stereotypical. But, in Gault, we have a fully formed individual who lies, cheats, steals, trusts and is inevitably betrayed. Gault has a moral code all of his own. He will not smuggle certain items and actively works to thwart German spies in the early days of World War I. A true romantic, Gault does not trust women because, whenever he does, they prove themselves to be worthy of his low opinion. (This is, in itself, a remarkable change from women characters in early Hodgson works who are invariably virtuous, chaste and worthy of rescue.)
There is no horror in the Gault stories which, I fear, have caused many to ignore them and that is a shame. They are filled with action and adventure with spies, duplicitous women and corrupt government officials. They are, quite frankly, excellent examples of the sea adventure stories of their day and terrific pulp reading. Mark Valentine wrote a splendid article on the Gault stories which appeared in the second issue of Sargasso: The Journal of William Hope Hodgson Studies. Hodgson wrote more Gault stories than he did featuring Carnacki. There are at least thirteen Gault stories compared to Carnacki’s nine (or eight considering that Carnacki was shoe-horned into a revised version of an earlier story to neither’s benefit). Perhaps someday I will reprint all of the Gault stories in one volume so that everyone can read these marvelous tales.
(Side-note, I have no idea if they are Hodgson fans but the creators/writers of the show LOST once had a smuggler character named Captain Gault!)
greydog: Hodgson stays with many people from their youth because of his stunning imagery. Provide us with a piece of WHH imagery that really gets to you.
Gafford: There’s so many that it’s really hard to choose. Do I pick the narrator’s futuristic vision in THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND? The haunted trees and the Sargasso Sea in THE BOATS OF THE ‘GLEN CARRIG’? The ghost ship coming into view in THE GHOST PIRATES? Or the narrator’s trek over the midnight landscape of THE NIGHT LAND? So much of Hodgson is built on strong imagery.
I’d have to say that one that has really stayed with me over the years is the image of the malevolent ocean in “Out of the Storm”. In it, a scientist is receiving messages via telegraph from a friend who is on a boat that is in the middle of a cataclysmic ocean storm and is sinking. The images of that vast, uncaring sea are horrifying and are written by a man who knew of what he wrote. How many storms like this must Hodgson have seen during his time at sea? That gives this story a terror and verisimilitude that few others can ever match. Here’s a brief excerpt:
“Such a sight is difficult to describe to the living; though the Dead of the Sea know of it without words of mine. It is such a sight that none is allowed to see and live. It is a picture for the doomed and the dead; one of the sea’s hell-orgies—one of the Thing’s monstrous gloatings over the living—say the alive-in-death, those upon the brink. I have no right to tell of it to you; to speak of it to one of the living is to initiate innocence into one of the infernal mysteries—to talk of foul things to a child. Yet I care not! I will expose, in all its hideous nakedness, the death-side of the sea. The undoomed living shall know some of the things that death has hitherto so well guarded. Death knows not of this little instrument beneath my hands that connects me still with the quick, else would he hast to quiet me.”
It’s an incredible story and I can’t recommend it enough. There’s even an audio version here:
greydog: And we should point out that you write weird fiction yourself. Does Hodgson influence your own work in any way?
Gafford: Well, not consciously. With few exceptions, I don’t set out to write a ‘Hodgson’ story. I think it would be for others to say how much or how little Hodgson has influenced me in my own writing. I would venture to say that, if anything, his sense of cosmic horror (shared by Lovecraft) has been a big influence. The concept that humanity is meaningless and unimportant in the universe is one that I both share and expound in much of my own fiction. We’re all pawns in one sense or another. I did write a story based on Hodgson’s final days in WWI called “The Land of Lonesomeness” where I attempted to put much of Hodgson’s life and work in perspective before that mortar shell fell on him. I think it’s one of my better stories and I tried to equate the landscape of THE NIGHT LAND with that of WWI Ypres. (This story was published in Weird Fiction Review and will be included in my upcoming collection of weird stories, THE DREAMER IN FIRE AND OTHER STORIES due out from Hippocampus Press in 2016.)
greydog: It’s nearly a century since Hodgson was killed in the Great War, and yet we’re doing this tribute to him. To what would you ascribe the continued and growing interest in his work?
Gafford: I think that, in many ways, Hodgson still resonates with us even a century later. His themes and plots are still very much ‘man vs. universe’ and that is a struggle that continues to this day. And then, of course, there’s his great imaginative and visual power. Some of the images in his work are so stunning that one cannot equate them with anything else. THE NIGHT LAND is like one long, continuous fever dream with images that shock, amaze and terrorize. There are few people whom, after I convince them to read some Hodgson, do not come away with something to admire. His words may be clumsy at times but his stories often have the impact of a brick to the face. I doubt that Hodgson will ever have the impact of a Lovecraft or even a Machen but it is my dearest hope that, 100 years from now, there will still be acolytes spreading the word.
greydog: And finally, for fun, which Hodgson story or novel does Sam Gafford like the most as a reader?
Gafford: It may be sacrilegious for me to say this but THE GHOST PIRATES has always been my favorite Hodgson novel. As I said before, I love the literature of the sea and this is a high point in that genre for me. The amount of detail is so amazing that you feel you’re actually on board that doomed ship and I especially love the eeriness of the whole story. That point in the novel when they actually see the ghost ship is entrancing and the scientific rationale for the whole thing appeals to me as well. It’s a novel that I don’t feel gets enough love from the readers and critics. I would rather read that novel than THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND.
greydog: Thank you! Sam’s excellent website devoted to WHH can be found through this link:
Carnacki audiobooks
