Part 1. (Machen, Lovecraft, Ghostbusters)
Part 1.5. (More Lovecraft)
Part 2. (Lovecraft Country, Jeroboam Henley)
Part 3. (Batman)
Part 4. (More Machen, Helen's Story)
Part 5. (Black Tom, Vellitt Boe, Ring Shout)
Part 6. (Stephen King)
Part 6.5. (More Stephen King)
Part 6.6. (Even more Stephen King)
More William Hope Hodgson!!!
See "House on the Borderland" review.
The Abyss Trilogy (1907-1909)
Carnacki The Ghost Finder (1910-1912)
The Night Land (1912)
I'll go in reading order instead of graphic order....
Carnacki The Ghost Finder (1910-1912).
Love it!! Instant Carnacki fan!
It's Ghostbusters, it's Scooby-Doo, it's everything I wanted it to be.
It delivered the goods like gangbusters.
The character is just adorable. He's a lovable eccentric. High on the spectrum. His social batteries run out quickly. They could do these as Aaardman style BBC cartoons, and it would be endearing as Hell.
Carnacki uses an Electric Pentacle which is what it sounds like.
A pentacle made of wire he lays on the floor, and it's got blinking lights and a battery.
Through some mumbo-jumbo technobabble, this acts as a forcefield against ghosts.
Sometimes it's ghosts, sometimes it's Scooby-Doo villains.
Dark Scooby-Doo villains capable of murder and animal torture.
Okay, maybe not those ones as cartoons...
"The Whistling Room" is absolutely bizarre.
Worthy of being an episode of The Real Ghostbusters.
In "The Haunted Jarvee" Carnacki tries to zap the shadow things with "negative vibrations".
So, we've even got the goddamned proton gun.
Ghostbusters indeed!
In "The Hog" Carnacki basically has a steampunk mind-reading machine.
Carnacki is pretty much Reed Richards level smart.
I can see why this only has a cult following of weirdos like me.
Empiricists who want their detective fiction pure, and who would have been Sherlock fans wouldn't have liked the ghosts being real; but spiritualists would have seen their little world as being made fun of. The world wasn't quite ready for Ghostbusters yet.
Kept spotting links to the song "William" throughout this whole thing.
Carnacki says "do you understand?" a shit ton.
IIIII uuunderstaaaand!! 😏
The Abyss Trilogy (1907-1909)
The Boats of the Glen Carrig (1907)
It's the grandfather of "At The Mountains of Madness" and I like it better.
Like Carnacki, it's everything I wanted it to be.
Yeah, Hodgson was the missing ingredient that perfects the weird-fiction-verse stew.
His style was the mysterious "it needs something more" sensation I was feeling.
Narrator is John Winterstraw telling the story to his son James in 1757.
52 years before the birth of Poe.
150 years before Hodgson tells us about it.
The humor in "Carnacki" is over. We're right into "Blair Witch" levels of creepy.
The ship (the Glen Carrig) has sunk after hitting a mysterious rock (they think); they're in the lifeboats.
They come to some creepy islands, and there are monsters.
There are times it feels like "The Mist" on the sea.
They come to "the island in the weed".
From the song!!!!!
Among the monsters are the so-called Weed Men.
So-called because they come out of the seaweed.
But they're really squid men! Cthulhu-spawn before Cthulhu!
So, we get pre-Lovecraft tentacles.
It pretty much plays out like your standard horror. Some guys die, some survive.
The fun is in seeing who makes it.
What I subliminally loved about it, and why it bumps ahead of even ATMOM is I think this....
Work sucks, jobs suck, but if I have to do a job, I'd like to be on Hodgson's boat.
Even though the ships are working for the British empire, and a corporation under that empire, the individual crews are communal.
There's no fevered ego, there's no rabid individualism, there's no fucking human-islands.
There's stuff to do, and they do it.
They don't preen afterward.
They don't hand out employee of the month plaques.
They practice teamwork without ever uttering "teamwork".
"Teamwork" doesn't mean subordinate yourself to the big boss like a drone.
There's no "great man theory".
There's no "grindset, broooo!!".
There's no Natalie Harp worshipping the boss type shit.
Everyone just does their fucking work. Including the boss.
And all the stupid, frustrating, boring choring of digging, chopping, sawing, fire fuel gathering, etc saves them from the monsters.
Verne, Dake, and Lovecraft all have in common that you've got the great men on top, and the lower deckers are just background ants making their will happen.
No, Hodgson gives us the grinding of the lower deckers.
They even keep wanting to do the big hero stuff, but the boatswain keeps reminding them they have to stoke the fire, get food and sleep in, work on patching the boat, and all that grinding pays off.
The fires protect them more than the swords.
In fact, sword fighting is too fucking dangerous.
You lose guys, and you lose their work.
It's a failure when you have to resort to close quarters fighting.
They win by being a good crew, and they don't hand out fucking bullshit trophies after.
It's damned near communist.
Wasn't expecting that.
Ayuh.
The House on the Borderland (1908)
Here's bonus facts.
Found out in a Google rabbit hole that "House On The Borderland" is in the "Lovecraft Country" TV show.
It's the book that opens a secret passage.
The "The Night Land" fan sequels, and the "Night Land" RPG module merge "Night Land" and "House on the Borderland".
I'll jot down the obvious connections:
Both have time travel via soul travel.
Both have nameless protagonists.
Both of them are looking for their dead wives.
The "Night Land" protagonist is from the 17th century, so he cannot be the HOTB guy.
Ah, but one of the things TNL-narrator fought in the last home stretch was a pig man!! Boom, that links it to HOTB and Carnacki.
Good enough.
I still like HOTB best of the Hodgsons.
TNL's a close second though.
The Ghost Pirates (1909)
WHH says in the intro this is a third of a trilogy along with "Glen Carig" and "Borderland" but it's a theme trilogy not a series.
He doesn't name it. Hence the multiple fan-names.
Okay, so it's not a fan-made trilogy. WHH connected them himself.
Pretty standard pirate ghost story, but with SF jargon, and with better character development than Glen Carig. So...I actually put it ahead of "Glen Carig" by a teensy little nudge.
Narrator (Jessop) sets sail on the Mortzestus.
There are several rumors about the ship being haunted.
One older guy says "there's too many shadows" but he says it "shadders".
Ghost pirates start popping up. Like a modern ghost movie, they sneak up slowly, and then escalate.
Then we get the whole ghost ship.
Once it's all in full swing, Jessop puts forward a messy theory about ghosts being from another plane of existence, and that the ship may have some unknown sorta-magnetic property that's attracting the "ghosts".
He admits "I haven't got the head for it".
Cuz he's not a Carnacki.
But even with his science-head and equipment, Carnacki barely saved the day in "The Haunted Jarvee".
Yeah, I'm going right ahead and head-canon-ing this as a sorta-sequel to "Jarvee".
Almost the same exact pseudo-science.
Almost the same exact pattern of blurry ghosts, then mist, and the ship itself having the cursed property.
If the ghost ship is slipping into this world through a dimension, then the Glen Carig boats slipped into a dimension, and the "island of the weed" is on some alien planet or something.
Or a parallel Earth, or a pocket universe, or whatever.
And yes, the ghost pirates are in the song. 😉
The Night Land (1912)
A hot mess, but a masterpiece of a hot mess. And it doesn't really get hot and messy until the last third.
I started on 9/11. Took 2 weeks to finish. 3-4 days to mentally regenerate.
It's about as thick as "Skeleton Crew". 500-600 pages depending on the formatting. Mine was 511.
It's written in a weird 17th century-ish language style to make the world more alien.
I had no trouble with the language at all. It poured right into me just fine.
It was the repetition and sloggery that kicked my ass.
Hodgson spares you no details, and like real life, details repeat.
There's a shorter edition by Hodgson called "The Dream Of X" and there's an edition by another guy translating it to modern English.
Those editions can go screw. You need the unedited real version with all its weird flaws to really appreciate it.
Okay, so! Nameless narrator in the 17th century meets, falls in love with, marries, and loses his lady love, Mirdath.
She dies after she has their child.
Soon after, immediately after in the telling, narrator dreams himself to The Last Redoubt, the pyramid colony in the future.
It's like quantum leaping; he dreams there, but wakes up in the other world as the other self.
The other self is 17 (3 years pass that age him up to 20), and he has access to his knowledge, and alternate life memories.
Other-self has access to his memories, and falls in love with Mirdath, and misses her.
We get the basic details I've always known.
It's millions of years in the future.
There are giant monsters outside. Some are in hibernation, like big statues.
The sun is gone.
Light comes from lava and chemical fires.
Our time has faded away to faint traces of myth.
The sun didn't naturally die.
Mankind used some lost science to pierce the dimensional veil, and the monsters came through, and grew. The sun started to dim then.
Narrator (who I'll call X like "The Dream of X") discovers he has "night-hearing" which he describes as working sort of like radio.
Mind-radio is pretty much telepathy/the shining.
By kajillion, they've studied and cracked telepathy/shining, and can measure it, and boost it.
Like Cerebro.
With the Cerebro equipment, he calls out to Mirdath.
Mirdath answers back, but she's Naani now.
X goes on a quest to save her, and bring her back to The Last Redoubt.
Hi-jinks and monsters ensue!
The world building of it all....
The mountain sized monsters (The Watchers) move infinitesimally, like the Promethean Giants of DC comics. DC didn't invent shit. Classic SF/horror/weird came up with all of it.
The Last Redoubt is huge.
Thousands of floors high. Miles across.
Surrounded by a forcefield ring called the Electric Circle.
Powered by The Earth Current. Whatever that is. Sounds like geothermal crossed with sucking ionization out of the air.
The monster dimension piercing, the Earth Current, and the Electric Circle are Carnacki-tech on a grander scale.
I'd go so far as to say TNL is LOTR to Carnacki's Hobbit.
Hodgson even imagines television.
They have giant viewing tables that seat 10 thousand "like unto the camera obscura".
If they send live moving images, it's fucking TV.
Lain down jumbotrons.
Then there's the Diskos-es.
Sawblades on sticks. The handles are extendable and retractable.
We get later on that they light up when they spin.
The Diskos shoots flames when it hacks monster flesh.
So, its not just a glowing pizza-cutter weedwhacker, it's a LIGHTSABER pizza-cutter weedwhacker.
He goes into a whole thing about how it knows its owner, and resists new owners, and flat out breaks down for thieves. It's a living thing like Mjolnir and Stormbreaker.
Narrator eats/drinks food pills and powdered water that rehydrates on exposure to air.
Steven Wright had a bit "I bought some powdered water. I didn't know what to add".
Well, now we know.
Okay, so, now flaws.
The first two thirds or so are everything you want them to be.
A Lovecraftian post-apocalypse adventure-quest that evokes Krull, Tron, Mad Max, Heavy Metal, etc, etc. It lives up to that hype fantasy. I was playing hair metal songs in my head, and having a grand old time.
Then from the point of him actually finding his re-incarnated wife, it turns into a cringe schoolyard crush version of love, then wife-beating apologetics, then even that goes so far over the top, it turns into an absolutely bizarre absurdist Popeye cartoon crossed with "Wild At Heart".
It's a little boy's fantasy of love and adventure after he's seen his daddy slap mommy for ordering pizza instead of making a casserole.
"Hey, whoa, rewind there! What's this about wife-beating??".
Oh, he beats her.
Hodgson contrives that she starts going Harley Quinn on cocaine level bonkers to try to half-ass justify it, but yeah.
Three cracks of the belt on the back at first, and she shrugs it off, laughs, taunts, dances, kisses, etc. They go aways with her dancing and running about, and he finally beats the crap out of her.
Forget how many strikes.
Then he hugs her, and they both cry, then they make out, then she's all happy again, but better behaved.
So...not normal human reactions at all.
Like, weird Olive Oyl shit.
Insanity.
Naani acts like a damned baby. A review said "the heroine is infantilized" and boy is she ever.
You can tell yourself the archaic attitudes are the narrator/protagonist being from the 17th century.
You can tell yourself it's a chivalric romance, and that chivalry had a dark side, and Hodgson is deliberately showing us that.
And...if you like, X gets his come-uppance. Monsters come and beat the ever-loving snot out of him.
We never see him lift the belt to Naani again.
Even making those allowances, it's barking wacko.
But genius wacko.
As shown above, the world-building was a century ahead of its time.
There's some subtle racism, but in both cases of it rearing its head, it's by sci-fi analogy, and not nakedly "eeeww! Darkies!" like Lovecraft.
If you blinked at the right moments, you could even miss it.
I think for that time period, you pretty much had to be an anarchist or a Quaker to have every little bit of racism burnt out of you.
And anarchists and Quakers were looked at as weirdos.
Hodgson is enlightened for his time.
Oh, and X keeps mentioning how ripped he's gotten from all the walking, crawling, and fighting.
WHH was a bodybuilder, and quite impressed with himself, so X is his self-insertion all right.
😆 Lotta Naani drooling over X's muscles, and him humble-bragging.
Geez, WHH. 🙄😆
It's not easy to just write Hodgson off as a dumb fitness obsessed mirror-kissing gym-bro, because he has Carnacki as a bookworm-y dandy.
It's not easy to write him off as a chivalric royalist because he has the Glen Carig crew function as a socialist style collective.
He's too complicated to really nail down.
Even if he lived down to our worst assumptions, this book is...something special.
For all its flaws, it is a monument to human imagination.
I can imagine this as a Rankin/Bass animated movie like "Last Unicorn" and "Flight of Dragons".
Now that I get my gears turning on Rankin/Bass, I think this actually influenced a lot of things in Thundercats.
Particularly the mutants, and the Mumm-Ra base, and his living statue-gods that give him his power.
A Rankin/Bass TNL would have looked an awful lot like Thundercats.
Yeah, I ooh-ed and ahh-ed over "Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" but "Night Land" comes before even that.
And oh yeah, this slaughters "A Strange Discovery".
It is 13 years after though.
Hmm, yeah, even with all the weird crazy flaws of TNL, I still like Hodgson overall better than Lovecraft, Machen, Verne, and Dake.
I like TNL specifically better than their PYM-adjacent stuff.
For this whole Poe/Lovecraft/King journey, I definitely had more fun with this quintology than that first quadrilogy.
And again, even though I recognize TNL as masterpiece quality, I still plain personally enjoy "House on the Borderland" more.
That's always gonna be my favorite Hodgson.
That's the one I'll re-read the rest of my life.
I can't see doing TNL again.
Okay!! That's it!
Next up for books: "City at the End of Time".
Next entry: all the little side-quests.
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