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Reader and Collector, v. 3, issue 3, June 1944
Page 5
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THE WEIRD WORK OF WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON by H.P. Lovecraft Master of the Macabre. Author of fifty or more tales of fantasy and terror - chiefly in Weird Tales magazine. Represented in the anthologies "Creeps by Night", "Beware after Dark", "Not at Night". Author of brilliant essay on "Supernatural Horror in Literature". Complete works may be found in the two volumes "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" and "The Outsider" published by Arkham House. Mr. H.C. Koenig has conferred a great service on American "fandom" by calling attention to the remarkable work of an author relatively unknown in this country, yet actually forming one of the few who have captured the elusive inmost essence of the weird. Among connoisseurs of fantasy fiction William Hope Hodgson deserved a high and permanent rank; for, triumphing over a sadly uneven stylistic quality, he now and then equals the best masters in his vague suggestions of lurking worlds and beings behind the ordinary surface of life. Despite a tendency towards 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 significant details, or in conveying feelings of the spectral and 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 encountered by the survivors of a sunken ship. The brooding menace in the earlier parts of the book is impossible to surpass, though a let down 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 other-world 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) --- regarding 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
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THE WEIRD WORK OF WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON by H.P. Lovecraft Master of the Macabre. Author of fifty or more tales of fantasy and terror - chiefly in Weird Tales magazine. Represented in the anthologies "Creeps by Night", "Beware after Dark", "Not at Night". Author of brilliant essay on "Supernatural Horror in Literature". Complete works may be found in the two volumes "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" and "The Outsider" published by Arkham House. Mr. H.C. Koenig has conferred a great service on American "fandom" by calling attention to the remarkable work of an author relatively unknown in this country, yet actually forming one of the few who have captured the elusive inmost essence of the weird. Among connoisseurs of fantasy fiction William Hope Hodgson deserved a high and permanent rank; for, triumphing over a sadly uneven stylistic quality, he now and then equals the best masters in his vague suggestions of lurking worlds and beings behind the ordinary surface of life. Despite a tendency towards 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 significant details, or in conveying feelings of the spectral and 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 encountered by the survivors of a sunken ship. The brooding menace in the earlier parts of the book is impossible to surpass, though a let down 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 other-world 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) --- regarding 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
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