William Hope Hodgson reprints

[j d worthington]

I heard that Hodgswon was killed in trenches of WW!? His sea terror stuff is great. The olde style is what it is, ridiculous to crit it all these decades later.

I couldn't disagree more. "The olde style" Hodgson used was not "the olde style"; it was a frankly ignorant reconstruction of a layman's conception of what "olde" English (and not really that old, either; only a couple of centuries) was like. So, no, criticizing a writer for not doing a good job is by no means ridiculous; it is spot on, no matter who that writer may be. To deny this is to abandon the ability to think or read critically, and that is a disservice to that writer's memory and to literature in general, in my view.

I admire Hodgson on the whole (I have, for instance, the 5-volume Night Shade edition of his works, and proud to have them, too); when he's good, he is almost in a class by himself. When he's bad... he can be frankly almost unreadable. And yet even then he often has magnificent conceptions, but they are in such cases nearly ruined by inept handling. This is simply a fact. He was an uneven writer with a titanic imagination, but not always the ability to live up to it with what he wrote.

 

[BAYLOR]

I heard that Hodgswon was killed in trenches of WW!? His sea terror stuff is great. The olde style is what it is, ridiculous to crit it all these decades later.
I liked the end of HOTB, the guy in his chair with the Sun going around faster and faster, his dog turning to dust beside him... I named my dog 'Dusty' because of that book... * )

Hodgson was killed in the Trenches in 1916. He's another writer that ive often wondered what kind of career he would ended up with had he lived longer. I can see him in the 1920's and 30's selling stories to Weird Tales, corresponding o H P LoveCraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. . I wonder what he would thought of their writings?

Hodgeson short stories are wonderful and House on the Borderland is a great novel. Of His other novels The Ghost Pirates and The Boats of Glen Carrig are good books but , they never match what he achieved in House. As for The Night Land well ........

 

[j d worthington]

I have some problem with some of the Carnacki stories. Some simply are not thought out well, some the writing is rather slipshod. At the same time, others are really very good indeed. Ditto other of his short works.

When it comes to his novels, I'd have to agree with Baylor that The House on the Borderland is likely his high point as far as sheer imagination and the handling of an archaic style are concerned, though The Ghost Pirates is an exceptionally good novel of its kind, and The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" is well worth reading (though it at times reminds me a bit of Visiak's Medusa and Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket-- a book which really should be much more readily available than I've seen it, dammit!). And, of course, given his life experience, it is hard to beat Hodgson when it comes to dealing with the menace of the sea; perhaps the only one who has done so is Conrad....