Posted: August 16, 1999 at 03:56:24: by Edwin
I'm way ahead of you here. I have most of Hodgson's stories and I think he is one of the most creative fantasy writers I have ever read. Stylistically he sometimes loses his way, the Night Land is written entirely in a psuedo 17th century prose. But if you persist with the book, the imagery is astonishing. I have:The Boats of the Glen Carrig,
Carnacki the Ghost Hunter,
The House on the Borderland,
The Night Land,
The Ghost Pirates,
Various collections of short stories. I can thoroughly recommend all of them. Hodgson also had a series of tales, much like Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, though Hodgsons were all set in the Sargasso sea. It's interesting to note that William Hope Hodgson was a fitness fanatic and was one of the very few people to bind Houdini in such a way that Houdini could not escape. Hodgson was chased from the theatre by an angry mob who thought he had 'not played the game'. He died at the end of the first world war and one of his last letters home talked of all the terrors he had seen and how he could turn them into stories that would make his previous works pale by comparison. Alas, we shall never know.
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