Haunted Ships and Broken Men…
The Life and Work of
William Hope Hodgson
William Hope Hodgson was one of the most influential fantasists of the 20th Century. Weird fiction masters such as H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith were very vocal in their appreciations of him. Later generations of fantasists, ranging from Fritz Leiber to C. S. Lewis also heaped praise upon his work, and that influence has continued to this day; writers as diverse as Greg Bear and China Miéville both point to Hodgson as an influence and as one of the important founding voices of fantastic fiction.
Hodgson’s life was almost as unique as his fictional output. He served aboard merchant sailing ships for 8 years… he was of the last generation to serve aboard the merchant sailing fleets that populated so much of his fiction. He was also an amateur photographer of significant note, and took many photos chronicling life aboard ship. During his time at sea, which began when he was 13 years old, he became an accomplished pugilist and weight lifter.
The abuse he received aboard ship, combined with the general poor quality of life afforded to merchant sailors of the era led Hodgson to leave the sea, and speak out often, and vehemently against the institutions that perpetuated and profited from brutal conditions sailors faced. In 1889, at the age of 22, Hodgson opened “W. H. Hodgson’s School of Physical Culture” in Blackburn, England. Hodgson was a body builder before there were body builders. Though short in stature, he was an incredible physical specimen. He took numerous photographs of his incredibly developed musculature and used them to promote his gym, and his lectures on the subject of personal fitness.
It was the subject of personal fitness that led to Hodgson’s first (non-fiction) publications, and his successes in this realm lead him to pursue fiction writing as an vocation. His first success came in 1904, with a story entitled “The Goddess of Death.” But his second published story, “A Tropical Horror,” (included herein) was published in one of the more prestigious fiction magazines of the time; this story brought Hodgson to the attention of some very influential editors, and his fiction writing career took off.
Hodgson had a unique voice that combined a haunting cosmic sensibility with an ability to depict the common place, and the common man. During his lifetime, it was his ability to depict life at sea that garnered most of his commercial successes. His straight adventure narratives always sold to prestigious markets, but it was his body of weird sea fiction that really made him stand out from his peers. In particular, the strange haunted dead space in the Atlantic where currents didn’t flow and ships floundered for days waiting for breeze proved to be fertile ground for Hodgson’s fantastic imagination… The Sargasso Sea cycle of stories formed a significant subset of his weird sea fiction. Stories of haunted ships and broken men rolled off of Hodgson’s typewriter and into the imaginations of a generation.
Hodgson dabbled in many different commercial subgenres and the “psychic detective” genre was a rather significant one during his lifetime. Carnacki the Ghost-Finder is the protagonist of a series of stories that found success and significant readership both during his lifetime and after his death. With this character alone, Hodgson would become a significant foot note in the literary history of ghost fiction.
After his death, it was the weird cosmic narratives of The House on the Borderland and The Night Land that would be pointed to as his great achievements. These novels were a commercial failure during his lifetime but a new generation of editors reprinted his work, not in the context of popular “mainstream” fiction, but in the “ghetto” of weird fiction. What was too strange for turn-of-the-century mainstream readers was exactly what sf/fantasy readers in the 30’s and 40’s were looking for. Hodgson continued to find an audience amongst genre readers, being reprinted in mass market paperback form numerous times, most notably in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in the early 70s.
This book gathers together a sampling of Hodgson’s styles and works. Alongside his novel-length weird sea adventure The Ghost Pirates are several other weird and supernatural tales of the sea—one of his Sargasso Sea stories, “The Mystery of the Derelict” is included amongst these. Hodgson’s seminal occult detective is represented herein with the story “The Searcher of the End House.” While it is only hinted at, the weird cosmic wonder and melancholy that is found in abundance in The Night Land and The House on the Borderland can be found in several short stories within, including one of his most atypical stories, “Eloi Eloi Lama Sabachthani.” No summation of Hodgson’s work could be complete without a story that featured an abusive first mate or captain, and a lowly cabin boy or deck hand who manages to serve them their just deserts. This plot device is one that occurs so frequently in Hodgson’s work that one can’t help but speculate as to the horrific abuses Hodgson must have suffered aboard ship as a thirteen-year-old cabin boy. “We Two and Bully Dunkan” is a quality example of this type of revenge narrative.
This volume is only a primer that scratches the surface of the dark seas of William Hope Hodgson’s fiction. While his stories may have been written for the commercial fiction markets of his day, they still resonate with a power that transcends the ephemeral tastes of those markets. A hundred years later new readers are still discovering the joy of Hodgson for the first time. And these new readers, along with those of us who have been reading Hodgson for a lifetime, continue to be transported to the cosmically weird and thrillingly wondrous places that only Hodgson can take us.
Jeremy Lassen
San Francisco,
August 2012