The William Hope Hodgson Megapack Read online

  The Ghost Pirates (1909) is another haunted sea story, this time about a ship overwhelmed by pirates from another dimension.

  The Night Land (1912) is Hodgson’s most controversial work because of the awkward, faux-archaic language in which it is written, rendering the book’s content impenetrable to many readers. While the style has been called one of the greatest blunders in all of literature, there is no denying that The Night Land, like The Time Machine which came before it and Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth (1950) which is descended from it, is one of the truly great depictions of remote futurity, when the sun has gone out, and the remnants of mankind dwell in vast metal pyramids, surrounded by monsters of the darkness. Despite its numerous faults, which he acknowledged, H.P. Lovecraft found this to be “one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written,” and went on to say of the hero’s quest across the demon-haunted land, “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.”

  Among Hodgson’s shorter fiction, two of the most notable stories are “The Derelict,” about a decayed, fungus-enshrouded vessel adrift at sea for so long that it has evolved into a new kind of living entity, and “The Voice in the Night,” about sailors who have met a similarly hideous, fungoid fate. Besides sea-monsters and ghosts, Hodgson had a thing about fungus.

  The stories collected in Carnacki the Ghost-Finder (1913)—which are not in this volume; they may be found in The Occult Detective Megapack—deal with a professional “psychic detective” of the familiar Victorian sort, a descendent of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dr. Hesselius and Bram Stoker’s Abraham Van Helsing, and a model for many who came after, such as Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin. Some of these stories display considerable, spooky power. Others may disappoint because the “supernatural” elements turn out to be hoaxes, but this device is also the series’ strength. Psychic detective stories get boring fast when the reader knows that every odd manifestation is going to prove the result of a ghost or spirit, and be disposed of by occult means. Hodgson deftly kept the reader guessing.

  Late in his life Hodgson turned more to short stories for popular magazines, most of them not supernatural, whatever the market would bear. If he had lived longer he certainly would have become a pulp generalist like J. Allen Dunn or H. Bedford Jones, although he might have been drawn back to writing weird fantasy by the founding of Weird Tales in 1923. But as it happened, despite his being past prime military age, he volunteered for service in World War I, became an army officer, and was killed on a dangerous mission into No Man’s Land in 1918.

  Some of his stories and poems were collected and published in the first few years after his death, but his work otherwise languished in deep obscurity for several years until gradually rediscovered by a few anthologists, then by H.P. Lovecraft and his circle. Not only does Lovecraft discuss Hodgson at length in his pivotal “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” (Lovecraft’s comments follow as an introduction to this volume) but Clark Ashton Smith also published an essay about him.1 Hodgson undeniably influenced Smith. We can see the origins of Zothique in The Night Land. Since then, through the efforts of such scholars as H.C. Koenig in the 1930s and ’40s, and Sam Moskowitz in the ’70s and ’80s, Hodgson’s work has become better known. He was reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, then in substantial editions by Arkham House, Donald M. Grant, and Night Shade Books, and put into paperback (first The House on the Borderland, then his other novels) in the ’60s and ’70s. Lin Carter featured him prominently in the seminal Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, which established the canon of fantasy as a genre. Since then it has been clear that Hodgson is one of those writers, like Arthur Machen or David Lindsay, whose work is not always popular but, because of its utter uniqueness, refuses to die.

  NOTES ON HODGSON, by H. P. Lovecraft

  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 her
e 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.

  THE MYSTERY OF THE DERELICT

  All the night had the four-masted ship, Tarawak, lain motionless in the drift of the Gulf Stream; for she had run into a “calm patch”—into a stark calm which had lasted now for two days and nights.

  On every side, had it been• light, might have been seen dense masses of floating gulf-weed, studding the ocean even to the distant horizon. In places, so large were the weed-masses that they formed long, low banks that by daylight might have been mistaken for low-lying land.

  Upon the lee side of the poop, Duthie, one of the ’prentices, leaned with his elbows upon the rail and stared out across the hidden sea, to where in the Eastern horizon showed the first pink and lemon streamers of the dawn—faint, delicate streaks and washes of colour.

  A period of time passed, and the surface of the leeward sea began to show—a great expanse of grey, touched with odd, wavering belts of silver. And everywhere the black specks and islets of the weed.

  Presently, the red dome of the sun protruded itself into sight above the dark rim of the horizon; and, abruptly, the watching Duthie saw something—a great, shapeless bulk that lay some miles away to starboard and showed black and distinct against the gloomy red mass of the rising sun.

  “Something in sight to ’board, Sir,” he informed the Mate, who was leaning, smoking, over the rail that ran across the break of the poop. “I can’t just make out what it is.”

  The Mate rose from his easy position, stretched himself, yawned, and came across to the boy.

  “Whereabouts, Toby?” he asked wearily and yawning again.

  “There, Sir,” said Duthie—alias Toby—“broad away on the beam, and right in the track of the sun. It looks something like a big houseboat, or a haystack.”

  The Mate stared in the direction indicated, and saw the thing which puzzled the boy, and immediately the tiredness went out of his eyes and face.

  “Pass me the glasses off the skylight, Toby,” he commanded, and the youth obeyed.

  After the Mate had examined the strange object through his binoculars for, maybe, a minute, he passed them to Toby, telling him to take a “squint,” and say what he made of it.

  “Looks like an old powder-hulk, Sir,” exclaimed the lad after awhile, and to this description the Mate nodded agreement.

  * * * *

  Later, when the sun had risen somewhat, they were able to study the derelict with more exactness. She appeared to be a vessel of an exceedingly old type, mastless, and upon the hull of which had been built a roof-like superstructure; the use of which they could not determine. She was lying just within the borders of one of the weed-banks, and all her side was splotched with a greenish growth.

  It was her position within the borders of the weed that suggested to the puzzled Mate how so strange and unseaworthy-looking a craft had come so far abroad into the greatness of the ocean. For, suddenly, it occurred to him that she was neither more nor less than a derelict from the vast Sargasso Sea—a vessel that had, possibly, been lost to the world, scores and scores of years gone, perhaps hundreds. The suggestion touched the Mate’s thoughts with solemnity, and he fell to examining the ancient hulk with an even greater interest and pondering on all the lonesome and awful years that must have passed over her as she had lain desolate and forgotten in that grim cemetery of the ocean.

  Through all that day, the derelict was an object of the most intense interest to those aboard the Tarawak, every glass in the ship being brought into use to examine her. Yet, though within no more than some six or seven miles of her, the Captain refused to listen to the Mate’s suggestions that they should put a boat into the water and pay the stranger a visit; for he was a cautious man, and the glass warned him that a sudden change might be expected in the weather; so that he would have no one leave the ship on any unnecessary business. But, for all that he had caution, curiosity was by no means lacking in him, and his telescope, at intervals, was turned on the ancient hulk through all the day.

  * * * *

  Then, it would be about six bells in the second dog watch, a sail was sighted astern, coming up steadily but slowly. By eight bells, they were able to make out that a small barque was bringing the wind with her; her yards were squared and every stitch set. Yet the night had advanced apace, and it was nigh to eleven o’clock before the wind reached those aboard the Tarawak. When at last it arrived, there was a slight rustling and quaking of canvas, and odd creaks here and there in the darkness amid the gear, as each portion of the running and standing rigging took up the strain.

  Beneath the bows, and alongside, there came gentle rippling noises, as the vessel gathered way; and so, for the better part of the next hour, they slid through the water at something less than a couple of knots in the sixty minutes.

  To starboard of them, they could see the red light of the little barque, which had brought up the wind with her, and was now forging slowly ahead, being better able evidently than the big, heavy Tarawak to take advantage of so slight a breeze.

  About a quarter to twelve, just after the relieving watch had been roused, lights were observed to be moving to and fro upon the small barque, and by midnight it was palpable that, through some cause or other, she was dropping astern.

  When the Mate arrived on deck to relieve the Second, the latter officer informed him of the possibility that something unusual had occurred aboard the barque, telling of the lights about her decks,2 and how that, in the last quarter of an hour, she had begun to drop astern.

  On hearing the Second Mate’s account, the First sent one of the ’prentices for his night-glasses, and, when they were brought, studied the other vessel intently—that is, so well as he was able through the darkness; for, even through the night-glasses, she showed only as a vague shape, surmounted by the three dim towers of her masts and sails.

  Suddenly, the Mate gave out a sharp exclamation; for, beyond the barque, there was something else shown dimly in the field of vision. He studied it with great intentness, ignoring for the instant, the Second’s queries as to what it was that had caused him to exclaim.

  All at once, he said, with a little note of excitement in his voice:

  “The derelict! The barque’s run into the weed around that old hooker!”

  The Second Mate gave a mutter of surprised assent and slapped the rail.

  “That’s it!” he said. “That’s why we’re passing her. And that explains the lights. If they’re not fast in the weed, they’ve probably run slap into the blessed derelict.”

  “One thing,” said the Mate, lowering his glasses and beginning to fumble for his pipe, “she won’t have had enough way on her to do much damage.”

  The Second Mate, who was still peering through his binoculars, murmured an absent agreement and continued to peer. The Mate, for his part, filled and lit his pipe, remarking meanwhile to the unhearing Second that the light breeze was dropping.

  Abruptly, the Second Mate called his superior’s attention, and in the same instant, so it seemed, the failing wind died entirely away, the sails settling down into runkles, with little rustles and flutters of sagging canvas.

  “What’s up?” asked the Mate and raised his glasses.

  “There’s something queer going on over yonder,” said the Second. “Look at the lights moving about, and— Did you see that?”

  The last portion of his remark came out swiftly, with a sharp accentuation of the last word.

  “What?” asked the Mate, staring hard.

  “They’re shooting,” replied the Second. “Look! There again!”

  “Rubbish!” said the Mate, a mixture of unbelief and doubt in his voice.

>   With the falling of the wind, there had come a great silence upon the sea. And, abruptly, from far across the water, sounded the distant, dullish thud of a gun, followed almost instantly by several minute, but sharply defined, reports, like the cracking of a whip out in the darkness.

  “Jove!” cried the Mate, “I believe you’re right.” He paused and stared. “There!” he said. “I saw the flashes then. They’re firing from the poop, I believe.… I must call the Old Man.”

  He turned and ran hastily down into the saloon, knocked on the door of the Captain’s cabin, and entered. He turned up the lamp, and, shaking his superior into wakefulness, told him of the thing he believed to be happening aboard the barque.

  “It’s mutiny, Sir; they’re shooting from the poop. We ought to do something—” The Mate said many things, breathlessly; for he was a young man; but the Captain stopped him, with a quietly lifted hand.

  “I’ll be up with you in a minute, Mr. Johnson,” he said, and the Mate took the hint and ran up on deck.

  Before the minute had passed, the Skipper was on the poop and staring through his night-glasses at the barque and the derelict. Yet now, aboard of the barque, the lights had vanished, and there showed no more the flashes of discharging weapons—only there remained the dull, steady red glow of the port sidelight; and, behind it, the night-glasses showed the shadowy outline of the vessel.

  The Captain put questions to the Mates, asking for further details.

  “It all stopped while the Mate was calling you, Sir,” explained the Second. “We could hear the shots quite plainly.”

  “They seemed to be using a gun as well as their revolvers,” interjected the Mate, without ceasing to stare into the darkness.

  For awhile the three of them continued to discuss the matter, whilst down on the maindeck the two watches clustered along the starboard rail, and a low hum of talk rose, fore and aft.