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Hodgson’s The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’
Oct. 31st, 2005 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joysilenceLJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY dfordoom)
William Hope Hodgson’s The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ isn’t the weirdest book I’ve ever read. The weirdest book I’ve ever read was another book by William Hope Hodgson, The House on the Borderland. The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ is the second weirdest book I’ve ever read. In the mid-18th century a ship, The Glen Carrig has ventured into strange and unknown seas and has been wrecked. Some of the crew survive and take to the lifeboats. They initially reach an island that is nothing but mud, with strange and rather disgusting vegetation. They find the wreck of another ship, and encounter strange noises and are attacked by nameless faceless horrors. They make their way to another island, only to find themselves facing fresh horrors.
The horror is very Lovecraftian, and it’s not surprising to find that Lovecraft admired Hodgson. Hodgson was an Englishman who was killed in the First World War. The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’, published in 1907, was his first novel. What he seemed to be aiming for in this novel is what I call A Sense of Wrongness – these are beings that should not be allowed to exist, but they do exist, things that exist in defiance of Nature’s laws. There’s the same sense that you get in much of Lovecraft’s work of unhealthiness and corruption, and physical degeneracy. Hodgson is very effective in conveying a morbid atmosphere, an atmosphere of dread. If you like very off-beat weird fiction then Hodgson may ell be just the writer you’ve been looking for.
dfordoom)William Hope Hodgson’s The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ isn’t the weirdest book I’ve ever read. The weirdest book I’ve ever read was another book by William Hope Hodgson, The House on the Borderland. The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ is the second weirdest book I’ve ever read. In the mid-18th century a ship, The Glen Carrig has ventured into strange and unknown seas and has been wrecked. Some of the crew survive and take to the lifeboats. They initially reach an island that is nothing but mud, with strange and rather disgusting vegetation. They find the wreck of another ship, and encounter strange noises and are attacked by nameless faceless horrors. They make their way to another island, only to find themselves facing fresh horrors.
The horror is very Lovecraftian, and it’s not surprising to find that Lovecraft admired Hodgson. Hodgson was an Englishman who was killed in the First World War. The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’, published in 1907, was his first novel. What he seemed to be aiming for in this novel is what I call A Sense of Wrongness – these are beings that should not be allowed to exist, but they do exist, things that exist in defiance of Nature’s laws. There’s the same sense that you get in much of Lovecraft’s work of unhealthiness and corruption, and physical degeneracy. Hodgson is very effective in conveying a morbid atmosphere, an atmosphere of dread. If you like very off-beat weird fiction then Hodgson may ell be just the writer you’ve been looking for.
