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.
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.”
I’ll buy that. Grau’s piece can be found here:
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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.
Carnacki audiobooksAnd 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.