William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) - Edwardian Horror

The Voice in the Night (Short Story, 1907)

The House on the Borderland (1908)

William Hope Hodgson's much-anthologised The Voice in the Night is an early (1907) example of eco-horror. It tells the tale of a mysterious natural life form in the South Pacific which has the ability to absorb all life around it including any human beings who come into contact with it. It is a fine tale set in the sea-going environment that so often inspired Hodgson. It should also be regarded as science fiction since there is nothing supernatural in the cause of the distress of the couple who come alongside the narrator's ship.

I originally discovered William Hope Hodgson initially as the author of one of the better stories in Cuddon's Penguin Book of Horror Stories. The Derelict (1912) is also an atmospheric tale of sea-going monstrosity. He was also the author of the pulp series Carnacki the Ghost Finder. Hodgson is an oddity and The House on the Borderland is an odd story. It falls somewhere between pulp and the classic, not quite making the ranks of the latter but with ideas that can often take Hodgson over the line into at least the second rank of the literature of the uncanny.

A couple of Edwardian young gentleman go on a fishing and camping trip to the far West of Ireland which might as well be Tibet or Transylvania for all its connection to the 'modern world'. They discover a sinister ruin and a manuscript seemingly written by a madman which proceeds to tell of 'eldritch' horrors (Lovecraft's oft-repeated term is well used here since he seems to have considered the book a 'classic of the first water'). Since we are not into spoilers we will not tell more of the narrative but the reader should be warned that a good proportion of the book is taken up with a description of other dimensions and space-time that can only be understood as an attempt to translate Edwardian spiritual and theological concepts into the new science of astronomy.

First published in 1908, it sits, in this respect, somewhere between the severe scientific 'truth' of H. G. Wells' The Time Machine (a far superior book) of 1895 and the exceptionally dramatic but not at all religious space opera of Olaf Stapledon, his Star Maker of 1937. Unfortunately, after reading Wells, Hodgson's approach already seems very old-fashioned, with hints perhaps of a debt to Swedenborg and imagery that is on the edge of reproducing the spectacular canvases of Martin rather than presenting something that is a credible horror based on science. This is a story of the old dark house and of received visions of heaven and hell, pits and all. It is the literary equivalent of standard Hollywood creep-outs.

The book should perhaps best be seen as a step not towards science fiction but towards Lovecraft, the master of terror, whose own world will manage to remove all the supernatural and spiritual elements implicit in the nineteenth century tradition and replace them with the idea of a universe that is meaningless, loveless and perfectly comprehensible, albeit not always by mere humans. Re-issued as part of a series of minor and not-so-minor horror classics by Penguin in the UK, The House on the Borderland is one for the library and for reading as part of one's general education in the history of the Anglo-Saxon horror genre but I suspect that most readers will find it clumsy in places and over-elaborate.

The horror is also mitigated a great deal by our being unable to get into the mind-set of the Edwardian Christian believer, who might have a literal fear of hell and hope of heaven, while the love aspect now strikes us as merely sentimental. However, if you do believe in traditional Christian theology and have some knowledge of astronomy, then this might, just might, give you a sleepless night.