I have been toying for many years with the idea of writing my own Danse Macabre, which was Stephen King’s non-fictional exploration of the then-current state of horror circa 1980. Filled with examinations of influential books and movies (and even radio programs) from 1950-1980, and partly the memoir of a Boomer Generation horror fan, the book was and is a wonderful introduction to the mainstream horror genre. Part conversational, and part scholarly (King was an English lit major in college), it struck a perfect balance in competently schooling the average fan in horror subtexts.
I wanted to bring this balance to my own experience, and perhaps call it Horror Business, after the song of the same name by the influential punk band The Misfits. An indie documentary film already beat me to the title, but by the time I actually get around to marshalling my thoughts (I want to publish a few novels beforehand to establish some credentials) the title should be ripe for reclaiming.
The book would essentially list my own influences and my thoughts on how they shaped my view of modern (and past) horror. I want to mull over the importance of such obvious masters as Stephen King and Clive Barker, but also dip into the classics like Poe, Lovecraft and the Gothic authors. Growing up, I probably spent half the time reading the enormously influential (to me) splatterpunks, and the other half roaming through various macabre/weird fictions of the previous 60-80 years (speaking of my formative years in the 1980s). I’ll cover the splatterpunks elsewhere, but today I want to look at a certain author who popped up occasionally in various anthologies, usually with stories of a nautical bent.
I speak, of course, of William Hope Hodgson.
I’m going to assume that most people come to Hodgson these days through Lovecraft’s effusive praise of him. Lovecraft, of course, is an entire book in himself, but today we’re going to look at one of his immediate predecessors: a man who, though his life was cut tragically short at Ypres in World War I, nevertheless richly deserves his place next to such Masters as Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, M.R. James, Ambrose Bierce and Lord Dunsany. (Robert W. Chambers is another name that frequently pops up in this Pre-Lovecraft Circle, but aside from one weird classic, The King In Yellow, and a few random stories, he was mostly a mainstream author.)
Hodgson’s life story fairly calls out for a biographer: He ran away to sea at an early age (in an era when you could do that sort of thing), was bullied so much at sea that he reacted by transforming himself into a formidable fighter and fitness advocate, and eventually turned his hand to crafting some of the strangest, most striking weird fiction of the day. There is even a tale, told on Wikipedia, of Hodgson personally locking Harry Houdini into his restraints during one of the escape artist’s performances. He was apparently too enthusiastic about it, as Houdini claimed afterwards that Hodgson tried to sabotage his act by injuring him and jamming the locks on his handcuffs. I don’t know how reliable this story is, but Hodgson’s stunning body of work ensures he’ll never fade into obscurity as a mere Houdini footnote.
It’s never been easier to access Hodgson’s work; as of this writing, Night Shade Books’ five-volume collection is still in print (or near-enough). These impressive books are well-designed, with silver ink imprinted (not just printed) onto the deep blue leather cover. The covers’ graphics convey the feeling of an antique nautical map reminiscent of the mysterious and deadly sea that Hodgson wrote about so obsessively. Before this series’ release, Hodgson’s work was somewhat hard to come by. Back in the early days of the Internet I made a point of searching for Hodgson’s books, only to balk at the high prices a hardback was then commanding. Before that, one had to be satisfied with whatever one came across, which for me was the odd story tucked into this or that anthology.
Even if one didn’t know Hodgson by name, the odds were that a dedicated fan of weird/macabre fiction was bound to come across his work at some point. He practically had the monopoly on maritime horror—it’s probably due to his Sargasso Sea stories that we regard this oceanic cemetery with a sense of unease today. Hammer Films’ 1968 movie The Lost Continent depicted a desolate section of sea so choked with seaweed that it ensnared ships unlucky enough to blunder into it, and generations of shipwrecked sailors and travelers lived and died atop this small continent of weed dodging monsters (and each other). Though it wasn’t directly based on a Hodgson story (it was, in fact, written by Dennis Wheatley), the film must have been extremely influenced by stories such as “From The Tideless Sea,” in which the narrator spends years fortifying his trapped vessel against the monstrous octopus that lurks beneath the weed, ever waiting for its chance to strike.
Another 60s film was adapted from a Hodgson tale; Matango was based on “The Voice In The Night” (1907), one of Hodgson’s best known tales. This weird little Japanese movie was known in the States by the more hysterical title Attack of the Mushroom People, but don’t let that title fool you. Although it’s a loose adaptation, the film manages to capture the uncanny, keening horror of Hodgson’s best work, and its hallucinogenic imagery presaged the latter, psychedelic half of the 60s. Hodgson’s original story involved a man and woman who escape a sinking ship only to raft their way to a deserted isle. There they discover an abandoned ship, but no initial signs of habitation. The island and ship, however, are carpeted with a strange kind of fungus which seems to grow on anything and everything. Soon enough, the fungus is growing on them, and they are strangely compelled to eat the stuff, which only speeds their demise. By the end, they are grotesque parodies of human beings, and the story ends with the man forced to beg for supplies from a passing ship—taking much care to keep his now-monstrous form hidden in darkness. Permutations of this story can be seen in such recent examples as Stephen King’s story “Weeds,” which was adapted for the movie Creepshow. In the film, King himself played the country hick who is exposed to and eventually consumed by the voracious weeds that sprout from a fallen meteorite.
As a former sailor himself, Hodgson wielded an especially deft hand when chronicling life at sea. Shipwrecks, smugglers, and the occasional pirate are all hallmarks of his adventure stories, which appeared in many different magazines of the day. But it was when Hodgson ventured beyond the explicable and mundane and into the uncanny and supernatural, that his work gained a special sort of sublimity.
A good example of this can be found in “The Derelict” (1912). In this eerie tale, the crew of a storm-tossed vessel, heavily damaged and blown far off course, discovers they have been deposited near an ancient derelict. It’s immediately obvious the ship’s been abandoned for years, if not centuries. The crew takes a lifeboat over to investigate, discovering a ship encrusted with salt and corroded almost to the point of dissolution. A curious scum encircles the derelict for yards in every direction, in which the sailors can see all sorts of flotsam entrapped within. Once they get aboard, they discover a loathsome white fungus has carpeted the decks, a fungus that bleeds purple when struck and which ripples alarmingly when trod upon. The crew soon learns that the fungus is mobile, hungry, and extremely corrosive to human flesh. A sailor is engulfed by the fleshlike organism, and the rest of the crew escape back to the boat. But the men have not reckoned with the scum surrounding the ship. The lifeboat is mired in this membrane, trapped in this sticky organic glue while the fungus has now solidified enough to project a horrendous pseudopod after them. The boat manages to tear free of the stuff and return to their own ship, with the whistling cry of the thing still in their ears. A second storm carries the derelict miles away by the next morning, but the ship’s doctor, who narrates the tale, still wonders just what cargo the derelict was originally carrying in its hold:
“If we could know exactly what the old vessel had originally been loaded with, and the juxtaposition of the various articles of her cargo, plus the heat and time she had endured, plus one or two other only guessable quantities, we should have solved the chemistry of the life-force, gentlemen.”
It’s his theory the monster was a new life form sprung out of the ingredients stored in the derelict, the stuff of life somehow mixing and cooking within the hold, growing monstrous. The only question was whether the ship was abandoned and the monster grew on its own… or was its genesis quick and brutal, and the ship’s crew its very first meal?
Hodgson excelled at pulp stories like this, with just enough detail to keep you thinking about it long after you’ve closed the book. The idea of a derelict ship was thrilling enough without the monster. Can you imagine? The story was written in 1912, the year the Titanic sunk, a time only decades before sonar and radar and the modern industrial invasion of the sea. In those days it was just barely possible that a derelict ship could roam millions of square miles of ocean for decades, veering wherever the elements led her, never encountering another ship, never once beheld by human eyes—except maybe at a distance. In this lonely, empty expanse, an accident of chemistry brings forth a horror that could only have prospered in the empty spaces on the map, far from terra firma.
In his best work, Hodgson slipped the tethers of the normal world, letting fly his characters in an alien landscape far different from the terrestrial one of his readers. I’ve been to sea myself, during a summer break from college, and so Hodgson’s work speaks to me especially. I’ve ridden the endless, rolling waves and seen the distant ships slipping over the horizon, and I’ve felt every lonely fathom of the black depths below my feet. It’s a different world out there, yes; a world in which ghosts and monstrous creatures don’t seem quite as impossible as they do on terra firma. No wonder we have the stereotype of the superstitious sailor.
(That's enough for now. If I've whetted your appetite for more, try tracking down one of the five volumes of The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson. His stories are also available on various public domain sites such as gutenberg.org.
Next time we'll take an in-depth look at Hodgson's first novel, The Boats of the Glen Carrig.)
