Carnacki!

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

Complaints continue to reach us from all parts of the country to the effect that Mr. W. HOPE HODGSON's "Carnacki" stories are producing a widespread epidemic of Nervous Prostration! So far from being able to reassure or calm our nervous readers, we are compelled to warn them that "The Whistling Room", which we publish this month, is worse than ever. Our advertising manager had to go to bed for two days after reading the advance sheets; a proof reader has sent in his resignation; and, worst of all, our smartest office boy --- But this is no place to bewail or seek for sympathy. Yet another of those stories will appear in April!

It's hard for us, accustomed as we are to the far more visceral scares of cinematic horror, to relate to the plight of the nervous readers mentioned by the editor of The Idler in this notice included with that magazine's March 1910 issue.

Reading the story in question, however, might make their complaints easier to commiserate with. A premise that seems far from menacing at first - a room that whistles - is turned into a vector for some very weird and horrific images and one of the more gruesome backstories in these stories.

Other highlights of the series are THE SEARCHER OF THE END HOUSE, a story inspired by Hodgson's own stay, with his mother, in a supposedly haunted house, THE HAUNTED JARVEE, a most chilling tale of horror at sea, and the mini-epic of porcine terror, THE HOG.

Carnacki is a mix of detective and industrial-age shaman, cracking quite a few cases of fake hauntings - sometimes alongside very real hauntings as in THE HORSE OF THE INVISIBLE - and at least one case with no supernatural elements, THE FIND, is given a very clever solution, one that Holmes or Dupin would have been proud of. In most of the other stories, he draws on the ancient lore contained in the 'Sigsand manuscript' to construct such cyberpunkish devices to fight supernatural forces as the electric pentacle and a strange device that uses coloured lights to both draw and repel spirits. His devices, and the fiendishness of the horrors he faces were growing from story to story. Had Hodgson's career not been untimely curtailed (he died in the first world war) one senses that this series that would have grown to greater strengths.

Which is not to say they're easy stories to read; Hodgson's prose is passable at best, frequently dense and hard to follow, marred with intrusive conversational turns of phrase (Carnacki is narrating these stories to a group of friends, a framing device that counts for little purpose, it seems, other than to give Carnacki anudiene to whom he can expound a bit on his supernatural theories in the last few stories). His esoteric nomenclature is risible at times ('Saaitii', for instance) and the cod-archaic quotations from the Sigsand manuscript can grate as well.

Despite all this, Hodgson's imagination is truly original and macabre, and if you take the time to read these stories - as I did after an initial discomfort with Hodgson's prose - they have many dark delights to offer the horror fan. Here as a sample is some very effective imagery from THE SEARCHER OF THE END HOUSE:

"From then, until two o'clock, nothing happened; but a little after two, as I found by holding my watch near to the faint glow of the closed lanterns, I had a time of quite extraordinary nervousness; and I bent towards the landlord, and whispered to him that I had a queer feeling that something was about to happen, and to be ready with his lantern; at the same time I reached out towards mine. In the very instant I made this movement, the darkness which filled the passage seemed to become suddenly of a dull violet colour; not, as if a light had been shone; but as if the natural blackness of the night had changed colour. And then, coming through this violet night, through this violet-coloured gloom, came a little naked Child, running. In an extraordinary way, the Child seemed not to be distinct from the surrounding gloom; but almost as if it were a concentration of that extraordinary atmosphere; as if that gloomy colour which had changed the night, came from the child. It seems impossible to make clear to you; but try to understand it.
"The Child went past me, running, with the natural movement of the legs of a chubby human child, but in an absolute and inconceivable silence. It was a very small Child, and must have passed under the table; but I saw the Child through the table, as if it had been only a slightly darker shadow than the coloured gloom. In the same instant, I saw that a fluctuating shimmer of violet light outlined the metal of the gun-barrels and the blade of the sword-bayonet, making them seem like faint shapes of glimmering light, floating unsupported where the table-top should have shown solid.

This site contains the texts of the stories, with the illustrations that accompanied them in the pages of The Idler.

 

[Fried Egg]

Thanks for that, knivesout. I've got the Wordsworth edition of this collection which has been sitting on my to read shelf for a while. I reckon you've just bumped up my interest in reading it.

 

[Connavar]

I have read several Carnacki stories the wordsworth collection, its not WHH's finest work but its good enough read to enjoy his writing.

I think Hodgson's prose is pretty good for a horror writer from his days. Its easier to read,get into to the stories than other similar authors.

 

[J-WO]

Gotta love those electric pentacles! But what is it with WHH and Pigs? Porcine horror seems to turn up in everything I've read of his thus far.

 

[j d worthington]

You know, I've never come across anything on that so far, but there is indeed a fair amount of it. Well, that and nasty types of fungi....

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

Hodgson certainly had strong misgivings regarding the porcine kind. I find this is both the strength and potential weakness of horror that draws on personal phobias. As with HPL's distaste for seafood and sea creatures, when a horror writer draws on the things that scare or unnerve him or her the most I think there's a certain extra frisson of distaste and uneasiness in their writing. The downside is that if you don't share that phobia in the slightest, or actively oppose it (I am thinking of HPL's race-phobias as expressed in THE HORROR AT RED HOOK or the current of misogyny running through THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM) the whole effect can fall flat or misfire.

 

[GOLLUM]

True (w.,r.t HPL's "race-phobia") but that is when it helps to put things IMO into the context and social texture of the time the piece was being written. At least I find that helps me still enjoy something I would otherwise be outright uncomfortable in reading viewing it as it were through a contemporary prism.

Sorry, I know that wasn't the main point you were trying to make here but I thought my point a reasonable one to make.

An interesting point you make there though.

 

[Fried Egg]

I thought "Horror at Red Hook" was quite dull anyway...

 

[Fried Egg]

I'm really enjoying this collection of stories so far. I've read "The thing invisible" and "The gateway of the beast" and have started "The house among the laurels". I can't help comparing these to the works of M.R. James and I think that whilst they are not as subtle they are more effective at actually scaring the reader. Mind you, the supernatural entities (when indeed they do turn out to be such) seem far more malignant, with lethal intent than they tended to be with M.R. James.

 

[J-WO]

And its great that sometimes they're not supernatural and are still good mystery stories. It makes each successive tale more riveting when you've no clue as to how it'll turn out.

 

[Fried Egg]

The last couple of tales have been a little disappointing (highlight to see the titles): "The Searcher of the End House" & "The Horse of the Invisible". This is because, in neither is there a clear cut conclusion, i.e. real haunting or fraud. In both cases there is a person behind the haunting doing it in order to drive someone off but there transpires a real ghost at the same time just to confuse things. This just stretches belief too far that both a fraudster and a real haunting should come along at once. Carnacki speculates at the end of the latter that perhaps the fear brought about by the fake haunting somehow induced the real haunting but I don't find that explanation anymore satisfying.

Another thing is that a little too often now, when Carnacki has solved a mystery, unexplained noises and strange experiences are just put down to being over imaginitive and the victim just hearing things. It's like he threw in these occurences in order to build fear and tension during the buildup of the story but that he can't be bothered to explain at the end of the story.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

'..End House' pulled it off well, I thought - there was such a sense of claustrophobic horror in the basement - but repeating the dual-causes device in another story was a bit much. I suppose it seemed natural enough when these stories appeared in different issues of a magazine, but placed together in a single-volume collection the repetition is much more glaring.

 

[j d worthington]

I suppose it seemed natural enough when these stories appeared in different issues of a magazine[....]

Or, as I recall, in different magazines. Yes, that is one of the drawbacks of Hodgson (as it was with Howard) -- that tendency to repeat himself in such a fashion. As you note, it probably worked quite well in the original situation, but when one is reading a concentration of his work, this aspect tends to fall flat. On the other hand, when he got it right, he was darned difficult to beat....

 

[Fried Egg]

My pleasure with this collection has been deteriating as I go on and I don't know whether it's because the quality of the stories is declining or whether, as is pointed out, the repetition is too much for me. What's really starting to grate is the repeated asking of his listerners/reader "Do you follow?" or "Can you begin to understand what I mean?", etc.

I wasn't too keen on "The Jarvee" despite it being in quite a different setting (and a different kind of conclusion) but I really liked "The Find" which is suprising because it's not a ghost story at all, just a straightforward bit of detective work.

Just "The Hog" to go now and I'm saving that for a few days. It would appear to be the longest of the collection, hopefully it will finish on a good note.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

My pleasure with this collection has been deteriating as I go on and I don't know whether it's because the quality of the stories is declining or whether, as is pointed out, the repetition is too much for me. What's really starting to grate is the repeated asking of his listerners/reader "Do you follow?" or "Can you begin to understand what I mean?", etc.

Oh gosh, yes. I alluded to the infelicities of Hodgson's style in its attempts to achieve a conversational tone in my original post on this book; pretty annoying indeed. And yes, I believe The Hog will more than close out the book on a most high note - or perhaps a most infernal one.

Hodgson's prose is often clunky; where it truly begins to sing is when he takes on the truly eerie or cosmic.

 

[BAYLOR]

Reminds me a bit of the X Files.

 

[David Drake]

Am amazed no one has tried to adapt it to tv.

 

[Randy M.]

There was an adaptation of one of the Carnacki stories in the 1970s for The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, "The Horse of the Invisible," starring Donald Pleasence as Carnacki.


Randy M.

 

[David Drake]

Never knew that, will try to dig it up sometime.

 

[Randy M.]

I saw The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes first run (and I can't tell you how old saying that makes me feel) and at the time they seemed great fun.


Randy M.