William Hope Hodgson
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William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918) was an English author of horror and fantastic fiction.
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 'Glen 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 order", 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)
- The Dream of X (1912) (shortened version of The Night Land)
- Carnacki, the Ghost Finder (1913) (collection of short stories)
- Men of the Deep Waters (1914) (collection)
- The Luck of the Strong (1916) (collection)
- Captain Gault, Being the Exceedingly Private Log of a Sea-Captain (1917) (collection)
- "Eloi Eloi Lama Sabachthani" (20 September1919) Originally published as "The Baumoff Explosive".
Recent Collections
- Out of the Storm: Uncollected Fantasies (1975) (Sam Moskowitz, ed)
- The Haunted 'Pampero' (1992)
- Terrors of the Sea (1996) (unpublished and uncollected fantasies, Sam Moskowitz, ed)
- The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" and Other Nautical Adventures: The Collected Fiction v1 (2004)
- The House on the Borderland and Other Mysterious Places: The Collected Fiction V 2 (2004)
- The Ghost Pirates and Other Revenants of The Sea: The Collected Fiction V 3 (not yet published)
- The Night Land and Other Romances: The Collected Fiction of V 4 (not yet published)
- The Dream of X and Other Fantastic Visions: The Collected Fiction V 5 (not yet published)
External Links
- Online editions (http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/aut/hodgson_wh.html)
- William Hope Hodgson (http://alangullette.com/lit/hodgson/)
- Dani Zweig's Belated Reviews (http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/sf/dani/032.htm)
- Supernatural Detectives (http://members.aol.com/MG4273/weirdmen.htm#Hodgson)
- Thomas Carnacki (http://www.violetbooks.com/REVIEWS/barnett-carnacki.html)
- The Night Land, a fan site (http://home.clara.net/andywrobertson/nightmap.html)
- H. P. Lovecraft on Hodgson (http://home.clara.net/andywrobertson/nighthpl.html)
- William Hope Hodgson (http://greatsfandf.com/AUTHORS/WilliamHopeHodgson.shtml): as a fantasy author
- etext of The Night Land (http://eserver.org/fiction/nightland/contents.html)
- Nighshade Books (http://www.nightshadebooks.com/author.aspx?authorid=8)
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