William Hodgson’s Horror Trilogy: The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
As a pioneer of horror writing in the early part of the twentieth century, what Hodgson lacked in skill, he made up for in imagination.
I must confess, I have twice tried to read through Hodgson’s masterwork THE NIGHT LAND and failed both times. It’s a tough slog full of brilliant, hair-raising concepts weighed down by turgid, overwrought, and deliberately anachronistic prose.
By contrast, his “trilogy” of unrelated short novels, including THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND, THE BOATS OF THE ‘GLEN CARRIG,’ and ‘THE GHOST PIRATES’ are surprisingly readable even if they could have benefited from additional editorial work.
In these novels, Hodgson reveals that, in spite of his tendency to fall into both irrelevant and monotonous detail as well as an amateurishly purple style, he has a real talent for action and adventure writing.
THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND, easily the weirdest of these works, becomes genuinely exciting as its lone, beleaguered narrator struggles to defend his supernaturally-infused house from an invading race of pig-faced and claw-handed invaders. By contrast, the book drags during a sequence in which the narrator has a vision of the end of the world that is analogous to passages in Wells’s THE TIME MACHINE, but considerably more monotonous. What these passages lack in excitement, however, they more than make up for in scope of vision, as Hodgson describes our sun growing dark and decrepit and ultimately falling into a gigantic super-star the size of a galaxy.
THE BOATS OF THE ‘GLEN CARRIG’ is a more straightforward adventure story. Starting in medias res, it depicts a group of harried sailors, after their ship has foundered, trying to make it home as they encounter weird and dangerous oddities such as an island of carnivorous plants and a continent of seaweed inhabited by giant octopuses and murderous mermen. The story drags as Hodgson narrates extraneous details (he describes each day, in succession, of the men’s making rope, instead of summarizing all with “We spent several days making rope.”) Like THE NIGHT LAND, the book becomes particularly insipid when Hodgson adds a romantic element. Nonetheless, it is a fun yarn overall.
The novel that works best as horror is THE GHOST PIRATES, and it also shows Hodgson’s skill as a writer of speculative fiction. The story’s narrator has the misfortune to take work on a ghost ship, but not any ordinary ghost ship: in some mysterious way unhallowed, this boat is open to the invasion of creatures from an alternate dimension, creatures bent on killing the crew members one at a time. Hodgson steadily ratchets up the tension with a skill unusual for him. It is genuinely frightening, and unlike his other novels, this one kept me reading far into the night.
Hodgson was a pioneer of speculative fiction and horror. His work is in some senses ahead of its time, particularly his use of science fiction elements such as alternate worlds and speculation about the final fate of the solar system. He deserves to be read most of all because of the writers he influenced, particularly H. P. Lovecraft.
Nonetheless, in these three works (unlike, sadly, THE NIGHT LAND), he can be read for enjoyment, for his own sake, and not merely because of his importance in the history of genre fiction.
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