Post by thealmightymudworm on Nov 19, 2013 15:57:30 GMT
From TUFFF...
As I said in the other thread, the WHH books I rate most highly are The Boats of the Glen Carrig (survivors of a shipwreck attempt to make their way home, and encounter lots of weird and nasty stuff along the way) and The Ghost Pirates (very atmospheric, with a climax that made me go 'Whoa!'). Hope Hodgson was a sailor for some time, and it shows in these tales of horror at sea. I suspect that the current version of my long-unfinished gamebook The Sanguine Wave is a bit too strongly influenced by these texts, but so many of the ideas in them are just crying out for reuse in gamebook form.
His other major novels: The House on the Borderland, which is flawed (notably the 'writing about falling under the spell of some evil force and being compelled to go to the door and let in the monsters outside while it happens' bit), but it also has some very good sequences and boggling concepts.
The Night Land, which is not easy to read, but worth the effort. Apart from the unnecessary intro, this is set in the distant future, when the world has become overrun by eldritch monstrosities, and the remnants of humanity shelter in mighty technological fortresses. The world-building is phenomenal, and a lot of thought has gone into it, and the hero's trek to a doomed fortress to try and rescue the last survivors has a distinctly epic feel to it. Alas, the book did be written in one most ponderous and, in sooth, archaic style, such as is like to verily try the patience of the reader and indeed vex him until such time as he may be sorely tempted to lift up the august tome and to hurl it from him with most considerable vigour, be he not so worn down from his nigh-interminable struggle with this most turgid prose as to find himself enfeebled beyond the capacity of lifting the volume which has so beset him.
Also worthy of note are his short stories. The collection Carnacki the Ghost Finder recounts the adventures of an investigator into the paranormal. Some of the hauntings turn out to be fakes (but no less dangerous for being so), while others are decidedly real. I have mixed feelings about some of the stories of genuine supernatural manifestations, as Hope Hodgson does a good job of indicating how frail and helpless even a well-equipped human can be against such horrors, and then has to resort to a cop-out to ensure that his hero survives to tell the tale. Apart from that, it's generally pretty good stuff.
A number of his other short stories are collected in Masters of Terror volume 1. Most of the tales within are further examples of his skill at filling the seas of the world with amazing and horrific phenomena. Well worth reading.
a moderator said:
Not wishing to totally derail the thread on Legend of the Shadow Warriors, I'm switching the tangential discussion over to here.H.P.Lovecraft said:
Of rather uneven stylistic quality, but vast occasional power in its suggestion of lurking worlds and beings behind the ordinary surface of life, is the work of William Hope Hodgson, known today far less than it deserves to be. Despite a tendency toward conventionally sentimental conceptions of the universe, and of man's relation to it and to his fellows, Mr. Hodgson is perhaps second only to Algernon Blackwood in his serious treatment of unreality. Few can equal him in adumbrating the nearness of nameless forces and monstrous besieging entities through casual hints and insignificant details, or in conveying feelings of the spectral and the abnormal in connection with regions or buildings.As I said in the other thread, the WHH books I rate most highly are The Boats of the Glen Carrig (survivors of a shipwreck attempt to make their way home, and encounter lots of weird and nasty stuff along the way) and The Ghost Pirates (very atmospheric, with a climax that made me go 'Whoa!'). Hope Hodgson was a sailor for some time, and it shows in these tales of horror at sea. I suspect that the current version of my long-unfinished gamebook The Sanguine Wave is a bit too strongly influenced by these texts, but so many of the ideas in them are just crying out for reuse in gamebook form.
His other major novels: The House on the Borderland, which is flawed (notably the 'writing about falling under the spell of some evil force and being compelled to go to the door and let in the monsters outside while it happens' bit), but it also has some very good sequences and boggling concepts.
The Night Land, which is not easy to read, but worth the effort. Apart from the unnecessary intro, this is set in the distant future, when the world has become overrun by eldritch monstrosities, and the remnants of humanity shelter in mighty technological fortresses. The world-building is phenomenal, and a lot of thought has gone into it, and the hero's trek to a doomed fortress to try and rescue the last survivors has a distinctly epic feel to it. Alas, the book did be written in one most ponderous and, in sooth, archaic style, such as is like to verily try the patience of the reader and indeed vex him until such time as he may be sorely tempted to lift up the august tome and to hurl it from him with most considerable vigour, be he not so worn down from his nigh-interminable struggle with this most turgid prose as to find himself enfeebled beyond the capacity of lifting the volume which has so beset him.
Also worthy of note are his short stories. The collection Carnacki the Ghost Finder recounts the adventures of an investigator into the paranormal. Some of the hauntings turn out to be fakes (but no less dangerous for being so), while others are decidedly real. I have mixed feelings about some of the stories of genuine supernatural manifestations, as Hope Hodgson does a good job of indicating how frail and helpless even a well-equipped human can be against such horrors, and then has to resort to a cop-out to ensure that his hero survives to tell the tale. Apart from that, it's generally pretty good stuff.
A number of his other short stories are collected in Masters of Terror volume 1. Most of the tales within are further examples of his skill at filling the seas of the world with amazing and horrific phenomena. Well worth reading.