BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - FICTION

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 a n 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 fal

The Mask of Cthulhu (1939-1957 coll. 1958)  The Trail of Cthulhu (1944-1951) August Derleth.   The Taint and Other Novellas (1971-1983 coll. 2008)   Necroscope (1986) Necroscope II: Vamphyri (1988) Brian Lumley August Derleth saw himself as H.P. Lovecraft's natural heir, weaving his stories into the Cthulhu Mythos and incorporating the 'dreadful events in Innsmouth' and other incidents from the original corpus. He will suggest, in a fit of in-joke paranoia, that Lovecraft and others died young because they knew too much - a nice little conceit. He has been much and rightly criticised on two grounds - for being derivative (and even thieving and manipulating Lovecraft's unpublished drafts for his own purposes) but, more seriously, for attenuating the raw cosmic horror of the original (as if he had failed to understand its essential bleakness). Both accusations have merit. He constructed a mythological fantasy of good and evil much closer to religious tradition a