Hodgson’s first published book-length tale (but not necessarily his first written novel—see here: http://alangullette.com/lit/hodgson/gafford.htm) was The Boats of the Glen Carrig, published in 1907. In terms of subject matter, the book is very much like his short stories: storm-tossed lifeboats; strange, mournful lands; and hideous marine monsters ever lurking in a vast, floating subcontinent of seaweed. In terms of style, however, the novel differs significantly from Hodgson’s previous work. Part of this is simply the demands Hodgson placed upon his story. The novel purports to be the diary of an 18th-century gentleman, and reads as such, with long, labyrinthine (to modern tastes) sentences, and no dialogue. Yes, that’s right—no dialogue. All conversation in the book is dutifully written down as description by Hodgson’s unnamed narrator, so there are a lot of passages like this:
And so, after a little while, the crying died away, and there was another silence. Then, as we sat each one harking for what might next befall, George, the youngest 'prentice boy, who had his seat beside me, plucked me by the sleeve, inquiring in a troubled voice whether I had any knowledge of that which the crying might portend; but I shook my head, telling him that I had no knowing beyond his own; though, for his comfort, I said that it might be the wind. Yet, at that, he shook his head; for indeed, it was plain that it could not be by such agency, for there was a stark calm.There’s a kind of poetry in writing like this, but it takes some effort on the reader’s part to stay focused. Fortunately, Hodgson rewards the faithful, with never less than competent writing and quite often a stretch of prose that imparts far more than what’s written on the page. There’s no easy way to describe the curious, lonesome desolation of the island the castaways reach first, so perhaps Hodgson made the right artistic choice; the “Land of Lonesomeness” of the first chapter is no doubt best served with an elegant, reserved style that implies far more than it tells.
The narrator and his companions soon discover that something fearsome inhabits the island, but they can't be sure of just what. Strange and sobbing cries periodically pierce the morose silence, but not a living thing can be seen besides the odd, disturbing trees which dot the landscape. The castaways soon find a deserted ship moored in a small creek upriver. Driven by hunger, they board her and help themselves to the previous occupants' supplies. But their situation has hardly improved; as darkness falls, the men hear terrifying growls and screams that persist throughout the night. Unable to sleep through this cacophony, the narrator and the bo'sun are thus the only witnesses to the hideous noises heard from the room next door:
In a little, we crept both of us so close to the door as the chests would allow, and there we crouched, listening; but could not tell what manner of thing it might be which produced so strange a noise. For it was neither shuffling, nor treading of any kind, nor yet was it the whirr of a bat's wings, the which had first occurred to me, knowing how vampires are said to inhabit the nights in dismal places. Nor yet was it the slurr of a snake; but rather it seemed to us to be as though a great wet cloth were being rubbed everywhere across the floor and bulkheads. We were the better able to be certain of the truth of this likeness, when, suddenly, it passed across the further side of the door behind which we listened: at which, you may be sure, we drew backwards both of us in fright; though the door, and the chests, stood between us and that which rubbed against it.
Hodgson excels at describing the indescribable; here, the unexpected simile to a great wet cloth inspires a greater dread than any more concrete description could. Is it some sort of sea creature? A giant tentacle? We never find out, for the thing is gone by morning, and there is not even a definite sign that the room had a visitor of any sort. The screams outside have also ceased with the advent of day.
Loathe to spend another night in a place such as this, the crew work throughout the next day to provision themselves from the ship’s stores. There is plenty of food, but the water has long since turned foul. Distilling their own promises to be a lengthy process, but with a lack of alternatives the men must settle in to wait out another night. One of the crew discovers a box of papers, which turns out to be the fragmented diary entries of a female passenger. As horrid screams and cries pierce the surrounding darkness, the men listen grimly to the woman’s brief tale, a tale which answers no questions but serves to remind them that, whatever strange land they have found themselves in, the previous crew was unable to escape it. One bright note: the men learn that a freshwater spring lies close by, just within the strange forest.
The bo’sun interrupts the reading, commanding them to silence. The mysterious and somehow terrifying Thing from the night before has returned, once again scouring the room next door with a mindless determination. Panicked, the men retreat, and it is now that the Thing discovers their presence. With a frightening, mindless violence, the Thing hammers at the door, then moves off to try the windows. In a wonderfully eerie little moment, one of the men takes a candle to the window:
Then, even as he made sure of the fastenings, there came a cry of fear from some of the men; for there had come at the glass of the unbroken window, a reddish mass, which plunged up against it, sucking upon it, as it were. Then Josh, who was nearest to the table, caught up the candle, and held it towards the Thing; thus I saw that it had the appearance of a many-flapped thing shaped as it might be, out of raw beef--but it was alive.
No wonder the men are too “bemused with terror” to react! At least we’re now getting a fix on the thing… it seems like the tentacle of some giant octopus, but Hodgson never confirms it… nor does he explain why such a creature (or devil-fish, as it was called in those days) would lurk well upriver from the sea. Indeed, he never explains any of the events occurring in the Land of Lonesomeness, which rather heightens the effect.
The Thing makes several more attempts to break in, but finally leaves off with the approach of dawn. After a fitful sleep, the men rouse themselves and make a search for the freshwater spring. Next to the long-abandoned remnants of a camp, the men find the spring, but there is no rejoicing. The strange gloom that is upon this land sours their spirits, and the men simply redouble their efforts at stowing enough provisions to escape back out to sea.
In haste, the narrator leaves his sword at the spring. The cabin-boy, George, is eager to see the spring, and volunteers to retrieve it. Now, the reader intuitively understands this is a bad idea, with a swiftly-setting sun marking the onset of another monster-haunted night, but only the bo’sun seems to grasp this. He leads the narrator back to the spring, only to find the boy has wandered deeper into the woods. George has not mysteriously disappeared, as one might expect; the bo’sun and narrator easily catch up with the boy, who has discovered something exceedingly strange:
…we saw that he pointed at what appeared to be a bird against the trunk of one of the trees. This, as I moved closer, I perceived to be a part of the tree, and no bird; but it had a very wondrous likeness to a bird; so much so that I went up to it, to see if my eyes had deceived me. Yet it seemed no more than a freak of nature, though most wondrous in its fidelity; being but an excrescence upon the trunk… Yet, one thing I discovered; for, in stretching towards the protuberance, I had placed a hand upon the tree, and its trunk was soft as pulp under my fingers, much after the fashion of a mushroom.
Night falls even as the men study this oddity. As they begin to leave, however, the bo’sun notices yet another strange tree. Its branches are tightly wound around its trunk, “much as the lash of a whip is wound about its stock.” The men approach the tree, unmindful of the danger that comes with the evening. Then:
Now, suddenly, and in the distance, I caught the far wailing that came before the night, and abruptly, as it seemed to me, the tree wailed at us. At that I was vastly astonished and frightened; yet, though I retreated, I could not withdraw my gaze from the tree; but scanned it the more intently; and, suddenly, I saw a brown, human face peering at us from between the wrapped branches. At this, I stood very still, being seized with that fear which renders one shortly incapable of movement. Then, before I had possession of myself, I saw that it was of a part with the trunk of the tree; for I could not tell where it ended and the tree began.
Now, in this wonderfully eerie moment, we know just what is making those awful cries every night, and we know what happened to the ship’s crew. Or we think we do—what, exactly, has happened here? How did these ghastly trees absorb the missing men and women? Why? What’s going on? What is this place? Hodgson has raised a whole host of questions that we never get the answers to; there is only the fierce imperative to escape this mournful purgatory. As such, Hodgson has succeeded in drafting us into this party of castaways—we want them to escape, because we want to flee just as much. Then, as now, Hodgson was in the minority of writers in not trying to explain his stories’ uncanny moments. Most writers, in dealing with the weird, often tied a neat bow around their particular hobgoblin by explaining its motives: revenge, bloodthirstiness, etc. Hodgson often just let fly with his supernatural moments, and his work is the better for it.
So: apparently these trees have somehow absorbed the bodies of the ship’s crew (or worse, their souls). The narrator notices another face on the tree, this one unmistakably a woman’s. The inference is that this is the missing journal-writer, but of course that is never explained. Horrified, the bo’sun strikes the tree with his cutlass, causing it to bleed and scream like an animal being slaughtered. All the surrounding trees twitch and take up the chorus, and the men run in panic. They reach the lifeboat and shove off, and the narrator risks a look back at the abandoned ship:
As we went I looked back at the brig, and it seemed to me that a multitude of things hung over the bank above her, and there seemed a flicker of things moving hither and thither aboard of her.
Paddling back downriver, the boat enters the wide open sea once more. The narrator and his companions have narrowly escaped the Land of Lonesomeness, but the horror of it clings to them for some time afterwards. As a grim little coda, George finds and reads one last journal entry:
"But I hear my lover's voice wailing in the night, and I go to find him; for my loneliness is not to be borne. May God have mercy upon me!"
And that was all.
We’re now well into The Boats of The Glen Carrig, and the episodic nature of the book here becomes apparent. There seems to be nothing to connect the dreamlike terror of the first part with the more straightforward (but still fantastic and horrific) adventure of the latter half, but Hodgson has prepared us for the worst with the worst. It is almost with relief that we follow the sailors into another fierce storm, for here is a threat they know how to handle. Hodgson’s nautical experience serves him in good stead, with vivid passages like these:
Towards the West, the sun was sinking behind a curious red-tinted haze, which gave it the appearance of a dull red disk. To the North, seeming very high in the sky, were some flecks of cloud lying motionless, and of a very pretty rose color. And here I may remark that all the sea to the North of us appeared as a very ocean of dull red fire; though, as might be expected, the swells, coming up from the South, against the light were so many exceeding great hills of blackness.
…Then, when the sun was low upon the horizon, there came to our ears a very shrill, screaming noise, most penetrating and distressing, and, immediately afterwards the bo'sun shouted out something in a hoarse voice, and commenced to sway furiously upon the steering oar. I saw his stare fixed upon a point a little on our larboard bow, and perceived that in that direction the sea was all blown up into vast clouds of dust-like froth, and I knew that the storm was upon us.
Is there any lingering doubt that this is a man who’s been to sea?
An entire chapter is devoted to the storm, which very nearly dashes the boat to bits, but the bo’sun sees them through unharmed. Although the story never really emphasizes this, there are two boats of castaways (hence, the “Boats” of the title), and the storm blows the second craft away and out of this story. The narrator assures us they make it back to London, letting us know in the process that he, at least, makes it back as well. But the journey he and his companions must take is far more arduous and terrifying, and it will be some time before they see their homeland again.
After a couple of days the storm subsides, and the men dare to creep out from beneath their canvas shelter. At first they believe they have reached some new land, but soon come to realize they are surrounded by vast floating masses of seaweed. The boat must navigate around banks and mounds and virtual islands of the stuff, but a slackening wind carries them ever further into the weed. Soon they must row to make any progress at all.
I should stop here to talk about the Sargasso Sea, which I mentioned in the previous post. It occurs to me some readers might not understand the significance. (Hodgson’s narrator doesn’t mention the Sargasso Sea by name, but the chapter-name “The Weed-Choked Sea” is an obvious reference.) Wikipedia’s entry pretty much sums it up: an area of the Atlantic, due west of the Caribbean and a little north, bound on all sides by ocean currents (such as the Gulf Stream). It’s what’s known as a Gyre—the calm center of a massive vortex, and the dumping ground for much of the Atlantic’s flotsam and jetsam. Named after the abundant quantities of Sargassum seaweed, the Sargasso Sea has gained a slightly sinister reputation in works of fantasy and adventure. In real life the weed is nowhere near as plentiful as Hodgson would have it; if anything, the nature of the gyre itself (think the dead-calm “eye” of a storm) trapped more ships due to the lack of wind than the weed did. But then again, if Hodgson had gone strictly for realism, he wouldn’t have had much to write about, would he?
Anyway, the Sargasso’s faintly exotic “ship’s graveyard” image has only been reinforced down through the years. It’s served as the setting for many a pulp story, and even features in one of the old Jonny Quest cartoons. Hodgson’s genius was in making the place wilder and much more dangerous than it really is, creating a monstrous, almost-plausible ecosystem that lives on (and beneath) the gigantic masses of weed. And woe betides the ship that blunders into it, as the narrator and his companions soon discover.
In an eerie sequence the narrator describes an unending, stagnant landscape, populated by voracious, giant crabs that lurk in the rolling masses of seaweed. At night he sees strange, distant fires; the light of day reveals ancient shipwrecks stranded in the weed, their masts shorn off, and their hulls greatly weathered. The most horrifying sight of all is the great devil-fish clamped to the side of one wreck like a “limpet to a rock.” Its tentacles creep and coil across the deck, seeking purchase, or maybe just twitching in the throes of some octopoid dream. Rowing as quietly as possible, the narrator and the bo’sun keep a fearful eye on the sleeping monster until the ship and its erstwhile occupant are well out of sight.
That night, however, the narrator spies yet another of the monsters, described in what can only be called a moment of poetic horror:
A little later, there came to my ears the noise of a very great splash amid the weed… And then, suddenly, between me and the moon, there drove up from out of that great waste a vast bulk, flinging huge masses of weed in all directions. It seemed to be no more than a hundred fathoms distant, and, against the moon, I saw the outline of it most clearly--a mighty devil-fish. Then it had fallen back once more with a prodigious splash, and so the quiet fell again, finding me sore afraid, and no little bewildered that so monstrous a creature could leap with such agility.
Hodgson scarcely gives us a moment to absorb the image; within the same paragraph the narrator hears a furtive splash coming from the other side of the boat. Upon investigating, he confronts a nightmarish countenance: a white humanoid face, with a beak for a mouth, peering back at him. Hanging off the side of the boat, not unlike the octopus seen earlier, the thing actually goes for his throat before he rears back, screaming. Naturally, the creature (the great granddaddy of the Creature from the Black Lagoon?) disappears before the rest of the crew can respond.
With the dawn’s light the men spy a nearby island, and gratefully make a landing. It may be a mere speck of rock jutting out of an ocean of seaweed, but it provides some small respite from the fearsome devil-fish. A quick survey revealed nothing on the island but strange, gigantic mushrooms, and a strange, circular pit filled almost to the brim with scummy water.
Far more interesting is what lies a half-mile offshore: another derelict, only this one is concealed beneath some sort of man-made covering, probably devised to keep the giant octopi at bay. Its masts are missing, and the narrator presumes the ship has been stranded for some time, its crew long since perished.
As they study the craft, the narrator notices a large brown mass rising beneath their own boat, left offshore with only a crewman named Job to guard it. As the men watch in horror, the octopus attacks, knocking Job senseless with his own oar. The bo’sun actually swims out to the boat and brings it to shore, and Job is placed out of harm’s way while the men battle the tenacious monster. Only a crude spear to the thing’s great eye forces it to relinquish its hold on the boat, and it quickly abandons them for deep water.
After a meal and a quick inspection of the boat’s damage, the men settle in for the night. Job is conscious, though too injured to move, and the boat will need to be repaired; the bo’sun quickly realizes they cannot quit the island anytime soon. Food and fresh water will need to be procured, but that is for the morrow. The men drift off to sleep, except for the narrator, who leaves the tent and heat of the cooking fire in search of a cooler place to sleep.
What he finds is a night of bad dreams—of something horrible sneaking up on him, something to do with the circular pit in the center of the island. Inadvertently woken by the man on watch, the narrator discovers a faint trace of slime on his neck, and strange marks that have drawn blood. Puzzled, but not unduly alarmed, he takes over the watch, and soon is the only man left awake:
For a certain space, I kept very quiet, listening; but no sound came to me out of the surrounding darkness, and so, as though it were a fresh thing, it was borne in upon me how that we were in a very abominable place of lonesomeness and desolation. And I grew very solemn.
Solemn or not, the narrator is wrong about one thing: they are not alone. As he stands guard, he slowly becomes aware of certain stealthy sounds coming from all directions in the darkness. Panicked, he rouses the others, and they come to realize they are surrounded by some new, hideous foe. Burning every bit of fuel they have, the sailors wait out the dawn in absolute silence, beset by the faint sounds of crawling and slithering, and catching vague glimpses of things moving just outside the light.
The following morning, the men make a thorough search of the pit and the surrounding mushroom forest. They find strange tracks in the soft mud bordering the pit, as if made by wriggling eels. Worse, the area is crisscrossed with huge trails of slime.
After this discovery, the men waste no time in beginning repairs on the boat. The damage is worse than first thought, but the bo’sun is confident that repairs can be made. All they need is fresh timber, which the narrator solves by recalling the remains of a ship’s mast the men had discovered the day before, washed up on the far shore of the island. The remainder of the day is spent in cutting up the mast into useable pieces of timber, a difficult and time-consuming task. The men work right up until sunset, and then make haste back to the safety of their campfires.
There they make a horrifying discovery: Job has disappeared. Trails of slime crisscross the sand, and a foul smell still lingers in the tent air. Furious, the crew follows the bo’sun back to the mushroom forest, where they find poor Job, drained of blood. (I have to wonder here why anybody would name their son Job—it’s just asking for trouble.) The men quickly put the giant fungi to the torch, and bring Job’s body back to the camp.
After burying Job on the beach, the next day is spent finding water and moving the camp onto the island’s lone hilltop. It’s a much more defensible location, and it is here they make a surprising discovery. When night comes, a light can be seen from one of the derelict ship’s cabin windows. It seems the ship had not been abandoned or overrun after all. Excited, the men spend the following day waving flags and yelling like lunatics in order to gain the ship’s attention. The ship is mired in the sargassum about a half a mile from shore, an unsurpassable distance given the prowling devil-fish.
Finally, the two groups of survivors make contact, by writing words on great sheets of canvas. The narrator conceives a desperate plan to make a bow and shoot an arrow tied to a rope over to the ship, but the others dismiss the idea, pointing out that the distance is too great. The narrator insists a great bow could shoot an arrow over the ship, and finally the bo’sun is won over. Using the remains of the beached mast, the men cut and carve the pieces to make a sort of giant, crude crossbow. It’s a lengthy process, but the men have nothing but time. The narrator keeps an eye out for the monsters that took poor Job, but the burning of the mushroom forest seemed to have frightened them off. A couple of times he sees strange movement in the pit’s slimy waters, and weird fish swimming offshore, but he is satisfied that the danger is past.
Upon completing the makeshift bow the next day, the men make a few test shots, experimenting with arrow size and weight. The trials are failures, but promising failures. Finally, one of the men asks why they don’t make a great kite and fly a rope to the ship. The idea, so obvious in retrospect, is greeted with universal approval—but that’s a project for the next day. After dinner the men turn in, and the narrator takes his turn on night watch.
From the start something seems wrong; the moon has not yet risen, and out of the darkness comes “a far distant sound that grew upon my ear, rising and rising into a fearsome screaming and shrieking, and then dying away into the distance in queer sobs, and so at last to a note below that of the wind's.” As you can imagine, it only takes one repetition of this fearsome noise to send the narrator running for the bo’sun. Together, they walk the edge of the cliff, listening for the noise to repeat itself… which of course it doesn’t. Yet their vigilance is rewarded: the two men witness a strange procession of large fish, swimming in a straight line from the seaweed-choked depths to the beach. Strangely, the fish never reach the beach, disappearing at a point somewhere offshore. The men discuss this oddity, but soon decide speculation is useless and return to camp.
What follows is the most harrowing, desperate scene in the book. The narrator chances to peer over the cliff edge into the valley of the pit, and I shocked to discover the valley swarming with “human slugs,” man-sized creatures with tentacles instead of limbs. The narrator instantly divines that these were the so-called fish he’d seen offshore moments before, and that the pit must be the entrance to some underwater passage. The bo’sun rouses the camp, and after a pitched battle the men encircle the camp with hasty fires. A fearsome toll is taken on the creatures as they throw themselves on the crew’s swords and knives, but scarcely a man among the crew escapes being bitten or having his flesh torn beneath the squirming, implacable grip of the things’ tentacles.
But there is only so much fuel to go around, and one by one the fires die out. The creatures swarm repeatedly, until the narrator gets the idea to burn the great bow the men had been building. With plenty of light to ward off the things, the men rally and drive them back until dawn breaks.
The victory is incomplete, however: the men discover that one of their number is missing. Worse, Job’s grave has been plundered. This more than anything demoralizes the crew, and they spend the day hoarding fuel for the fires they would surely need that coming night.
To cheer them up, the bo’sun directs efforts toward crafting a kite. The man who had originally suggested the kite idea turned out to be an expert kite-maker, and the narrator watches in fascination as the huge, cumbersome thing takes shape. The men seem doubtful as to the kite’s abilities, but the thing fairly leaps into the air on the first try. This greatly buoys the men’s spirits, especially when they pass the following night without incident. It appears the creatures have learned to respect fire, but for how long?
After a few experimental flights the men fly a rope over to the ship, and contact is at last established with the people trapped within. A heavier rope is soon pulled across the gap (a half a mile’s worth of rope?) and tied around a great rock, so that notes and food may be passed back and forth. The men learn that the castaways on the boat have been stranded in the weed for seven years, fending off the devil-fish and the “weed men” all the while. I never understood how the boat would just happen to be carrying seven years’ worth of food for even a few survivors... but this isn’t the only story in which Hodgson uses this plot device, so apparently he believed it was entirely possible. In fact, the ship sends over fresh bread, tobacco and medical supplies, so clearly they have provisions to spare.
Using a tackle, the ship begins pulling itself out of the weed. Over the course of a few days, the ship inches closer to the island, until at last the two groups can almost see each other in detail. The narrator gets the idea of hauling himself along the rope to the ship, and being the smallest of the men present, the bo’sun agrees to try it out. Climbing into the basket that had been used to send food back and forth, the narrator is pulled across the weed landscape and into the waiting arms of the ship’s men.
Being the first man they’ve met in seven years, the ship’s occupants are overjoyed to meet him, and a hearty meal is served up. The narrator meets the captain’s wife, a poor mad woman whose husband was killed by a devil-fish, and the captain’s niece, Mistress Mary Madison, a young maiden who instantly captures the narrator’s interest. Yes, even in the midst of horror Hodgson finds room for love, but in his hands the blooming romance is painted in hesitant, awkward, and yet hopeful strokes, so the lovers come off as charming rather than annoying. We also learn that the narrator is only twenty-three, which surprised me, since the character reminded me more of a middle-aged gentleman than a younger man.
The narrator ends up spending the night on the ship, talking with Mistress Madison and observing the crew hauling in the rope. At one point he witnesses a devil-fish attack:
I saw the weed all tossed up like to a vast pot a-boil, and then a vague glimpse of thousands of monstrous arms that filled the air, and came towards the ship.”Though he is alarmed at the sight, the ship’s crew respond matter-of-factly, having much practice in such matters.
Morning finds the boat pulled miraculously clear of the weed, and the two groups of survivors meet each other formally—and with no small amount of joy. In this nightmare land of monsters and mired ships, humanity is the one thing in short supply. While another author might have piled on the action and terror for its own sake, Hodgson’s emphasis on human relationships anchors the story with subtlety and empathy, thus heightening the characters’ journey (metaphorical and geographical) for the reader.
With the ship now freed, the men now spend six long weeks pulling down the protective superstructure and repairing the masts. (The only time my eyes glazed over during the story was during Hodgson’s esoteric explanation of the repairs.) Busy as they are, however, never once do they let down their guard:
Yet, for all that we had not been troubled, we had more than once discovered strange things in the water swimming near to the vessel; but a flare of weed, hung over the side, on the end of a reed, had sufficed always to scare away such unholy visitants.
At last the work is complete. The ship sets sail for the open sea, leaving that cursed island behind at last. At this point the bo’sun attempts to relieve the narrator of his assumed duties as sailor, citing his original status as passenger of the Glen Carrig. After all the adventures they’d been through together, the narrator will have none of this, insisting he will work his passage home on this new boat, the Seabird. The bo’sun relents, and the narrator ends up working the evening watch with the bo’sun, which is how he comes to be central to the last horrific episode within the Sargasso.
The ship may have escaped the island and its denizens, but there are still miles-long masses of seaweed to navigate, and though the crew tries to keep a half-mile between the continents of sargassum they miscalculate and nearly run the ship through a patch. Thanks to the warning cry of the narrator they narrowly avoid entangling themselves anew, but their close proximity to the seaweed brings swarms of weed-men on the attack. A final, bloody battle ensues, but the monsters are cut to pieces and the ship gradually pulls away. Only one casualty mars their escape: the captain’s poor mad wife, who had joined in the battle with the rest, has disappeared, presumably dragged off the ship by the weed-men. The narrator’s beloved Mistress Mary becomes very distraught, and it takes days to regain her composure. By that time, the Seabird is well clear of the dangers of that mysterious, desolate, weed-choked sea, and homeward bound to London.
Having reviewed almost the entire book, I think I’ll stop here, taking care to leave one remaining mystery: does the Seabird make it back to London? The reader will have to read the book to find out, but it shouldn’t be too hard to guess.
The Boats of the Glen Carrig, as Hodgson’s first published book-length work, can be seen in retrospect as the perfect stepping-stone between his nautical short stories and his later, utterly fantastic longer works. Its monsters are natural creatures, without supernatural origins, with the possible exception of the “screaming trees” in the first half of the book. Although this portion of the story strikes a keening, eerie note more attuned to Hodgson’s later work, a natural explanation for the trees cannot be ruled out—which somehow increases the horror, I think. But these moments are few and far between compared to the sustained tones in what would follow: the ghost pirates of his third novel, the creepy eternities-spanning dread of The House On The Borderland, or the sci-fi/fantasy/medieval romance of The Night Land.
Glen Carrig is more of a final summation of Hodgson’s shorter nautical work, and works splendidly in that way. Strange lands, fearsome sea creatures, the lonely otherworldliness of a life at sea—it’s all captured here, and though I believe Hodgson continued writing genre fiction (he worked in adventure/mystery genres, too) for the magazine market, this really is his final word on the subject. If he’d kept at this sort of thing he’d really only be treading water, but Hodgson never stood still in his fiction. The Ghost Pirates, his third novel, also dealt with terrifying goings-on at sea, but he tackled it in quite a different manner, as we shall see.
But before that, we’ll next take a look at The House On The Borderland, which in my view is certainly his most interesting book, and probably the strongest link between his work and the later work of Lovecraft and his circle.
