Boring horror quest with creepy marital adviceEnglish author William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) got his start writing nautical adventure stories for pulp fiction magazines, then eventually moved on to fantasy and horror fiction. He is best remembered today for his two novels The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912), both of which span the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres.
The Night Land opens in the “present day,” at least as far as the narrator is concerned, but to us the world depicted seems rather medieval, like something from a William Morris novel or a pre-Raphaelite painting. The narrator writes in a sort of antiquated Yoda-speak, in which every sentence begins with “And,” or, on rare occasions, “Then.” The unnamed hero falls in love with his neighbor, Lady Mirdath the Beautiful. They marry, but she soon dies in childbirth. That all happens in chapter one. In chapter two, the narrator is inexplicably transmigrated to a world millions of years in the future. The sun has died, leaving the Earth in perpetual night, but heat and some light are provided by geothermal energies. This dark world is filled with monsters and evil. The surviving humans have retreated to a giant pyramid, miles wide and tall, containing over a thousand cities. The narrator begins receiving telepathic messages from a woman named Naani, who lives in another stronghold of human holdouts in a distant unknown location. He suspects that this Naani may actually be his deceased love Mirdath, so he sets out alone upon the Night Lands to find her.
The Night Land is slightly better than The House on the Borderland, simply because House was a messy assemblage of spooky imagery with no rhyme or reason to it, while the happenings in The Night Land actually obey a fictional logic. But boy, is this book boring! While Hodgson seems to have put a lot of thought into the creation of this world, it reads as if no forethought whatsoever was put into the story that takes place there. Random events just happen without building upon each other, and the text is unforgivably repetitive. The narrator wanders through the land, eats, and sleeps. Occasionally he sees a monster, which he either avoids or fights. Certain phrases are repeated over and over again, to the point where you’ve gotta wonder if it’s intended to be a joke: “I ate two of the capsules and drank some of the water.” “I saw x number of fire pits,” and “I lie down and rest among the moss bushes.” While reading The Night Land, you could space out for a half an hour and not miss anything, because each chapter is pretty much the same as the one before. There’s only chapter towards the end that could be called exciting.
And then there’s the love story . . . ugh. A large portion of the book is basically a marriage manual for troglodytes: If you’re woman is “naughty” and doesn’t know who’s boss, flog her. Because the novel was published before World War I, popular morals wouldn’t have allowed the hero and his female companion to have sex (because there’s no marriage in the wildernesses of the Night Land). Nevertheless, there are all kinds of clumsy, gooey love scenes in which Hodgson hints at his own propensity towards foot fetishism and S&M fantasies. Such intimate moments are not only creepy but also boring, because they’re just as repetitive as the rest of the book. H. P. Lovecraft greatly admired this novel, but then again, H. P. Lovecraft died in 1937. Given all the talk of wife-whipping, I’m not sure how one can justify admiring this novel in the 21st century.
Fool me once, Hodgson, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I gave him a second chance after The House on the Borderland, but The Night Land really wasn’t much better. This might appeal somewhat to the Dungeons & Dragons crowd, but I would imagine most avid readers of sci-fi, fantasy, or horror would find this book to be a rather dull and clumsy foray into those genres.
A supernatural bore
William Hope Hodgson was a prolific English writer of genre fiction who was active during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Many consider his 1908 novel The House on the Borderland to be a classic of the horror genre. The acclaimed American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft credited Hodgson’s stories, and this novel in particular, with having a strong influence on his own work. After reading such high praise, however, I found this novel extremely disappointing. It certainly doesn’t merit “classic” status, and it’s not the least bit horrific.
Two travelers on a fishing trip in rural Ireland come upon the ruined remains of an old house, where they discover the tattered journal of one of the building’s former inhabitants. In this manuscript, a nameless narrator describes his relationship to this mysterious abode. Though the house seems to be the source of unspoken dread among the residents of a nearby village, the narrator is heedless of such forebodings and moves in anyway, along with his sister and his dog. One night after dozing off, he has a vision in which he leaves his body and astral projects through space to a bizarre world far outside our solar system. This realm is dimly lit by a blood-red, ring-shaped sun, and is populated by a host of grotesque creatures resembling mythical beasts, among them humanoid creatures part man, part swine. Thankfully, he awakens from this vivid dream to find himself returned to his body and to his house. The reality of his strange vision is confirmed, however, when a crew of swine-men show up on his doorstep and attack him.
Hodgson deserves some credit for his inventiveness, but his storytelling is sorely lacking. The hellish visions and events of the book are all related with a startlingly emotionless, matter-of-fact dullness: “I saw this. Then I saw that. I heard this. Then I saw that.” Rarely does the narrator ever pause to ponder the horrific nature of what’s taking place, therefore the reader doesn’t feel any terror either. Nor is any attempt ever made to understand or explain what is happening or why. Books in the science fiction, horror, and fantasy genres may be excused from following the rules of reality, but to be successful they must establish some kind of alternate rules in their place. In this book anything goes. Astronomical phenomena is mixed with mystical mumbo jumbo. What applies to the narrator does not apply to his dog. The various worlds and creatures depicted don’t even obey the same physical or mystical laws. Things happen for no other reason than simply because Hodgson wants to describe something spooky.
All of which would be forgivable if the story weren’t so boring. It may be too much to expect that Hodgson’s horror could be as scary or as appealing to today’s audience as the works of current authors like Stephen King, yet even when you compare this book to Hodgson’s contemporaries or predecessors like H. G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or Edgar Allen Poe, this work is woefully inferior. There is a scene in the novel that involves the acceleration of time. Wells covered the same imagery beautifully in The Time Machine, but here Hodgson goes on for three chapters describing the rising and setting of the sun and moon. Day, night, day, night, day, night. The reader gets the idea after the first few pages; the rest is just beating a dead horse.
I first became familiar with Hodgson through one of his nautical stories—Jack Grey, Second Mate—which I enjoyed very much. I might consider reading more of his stories in the action/adventure vein, but I’m steering clear of his horror stuff from now on. Once bitten, twice shy.
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An assorted selection that’s neither assorted nor selective enough
Wildside Press is a publisher that resurrects and reprints vintage genre fiction from the classic pulp magazines. They publish a wide variety of “Megapacks”—inexpensive omnibus collections of stories and novellas, each united under a common theme or author. The Adventure Megapack was published in 2012. “Adventure” is a pretty broad category, essentially covering anything that’s not a western, science fiction, mystery, or horror story. Yet somehow, even with such wide latitude, this collection manages to feel homogenous and monotonous.
I understand that once you disqualify every story with a trace of space travel, cowboys, detectives, or ghosts in it, the pool of available pulp fiction has dwindled quite a bit. Yet still the definition of “adventure” feels pretty narrow here. The vast majority of these stories are tales of 20th-century white guys punching and shooting their way through exotic locales. Some good examples of this are Robert E. Howard’s “Son of the White Wolf,” which features his character El Borak battling renegade Turks; “Stories of the Legion: Choc,” by H. De Vere Stacpoole, a tale of the French Foreign Legion in Algeria; and “The Spirit of France” by S. B. H. Furst, in which British and French characters face a Muslim rebellion in Burma. Too many of these two-fisted tales, however, are predictable, politically incorrect, and just plain dull. The absolute nadir of this tough-guy category is “The Fighting Fool,” by Perley Poore Sheehan, in which the lead character is an obnoxious jerk who all-too easily assumes the leadership of a submissive Tibetan tribe.
To give credit for diversity where it’s due, there are a handful of stories set in Asia, with Asian protagonists. Harold Lamb was famous for such stories, though his entry here, “Said Afzel’s Elephant,” is mediocre at best. Dorothy Quick’s “The Black Adder,” a romantic tale of India, and “The Mindoon Maneater” by C. M. Cross, about a tiger hunt in Burma, are two of the better selections. In his central Asian tale “Every Man a King,” on the other hand, author E. Hoffmann Price clumsily tries to out-Kipling Rudyard Kipling in the local color department, and ends up delivering a story so crammed with proper nouns that it’s about as much fun and intelligible as reading the Kandahari phone book.
One story about auto racing (“Checkered Flag” by Cliff Farrell) was a nice surprise and a pleasant relief from the relentless fisticuffs. Another welcome departure was “Another Pawn of Fate,” by F. St. Mars, a hunting story told from the point of view of a jaguar.
My biggest complaint about this Megapack is that it’s almost totally devoid of historical adventure. There were entire pulp periodicals devoted to such tales, yet this collection barely even dips its toe into the late 19th century, with the exception of one story of pirates in the Caribbean (J. Allan Dunn’s “The Screaming Skull”). What happened to all the knights in shining armor, the swashbuckling Three Musketeers knockoffs, or the Roman centurions? If Wildside is saving up their historical adventure for some other Megapack I’m not aware of it. They haven’t produced one yet, while they’ve already put out The Eighth Science Fiction Megapack.
Obviously, you can’t go wrong with the price of these Megapacks, but you don’t just spend your money on books, you also spend your time. There are moments while reading The Adventure Megapack that you feel like your effort is well spent, but by the time you reach the end of the 25th yarn, you may find yourself wishing for a few hours of your life back.
The Kindle file has a lot of typographical errors; not enough to hinder understanding, but enough to annoy. One of the shortest stories was pasted twice, so it appears duplicated in its entirety. The copy I downloaded even had the wrong cover image. Wildside publishes good stuff, but they should pay more attention to quality control.
Stories in this collection
(Some novella-length works have been reviewed individually. Click on titles below.)
Son of the White Wolf by Robert E. Howard
Every Man a King by E. Hoffmann Price
Pearl Hunger by Albert Richard Wetjen
The Black Adder by Dorothy Quick
A Meal for the Devil by K. Christopher Barr
Jack Grey, Second Mate by William Hope Hodgson
Said Afzel’s Elephant by Harold Lamb
Adventure’s Heart by Albert Dorrington
Another Pawn of Fate by F. St. Mars
Mystery on Dead Man Reef by George Armin Shaftel
Hag Gold by James Francis Dwyer
Maori Justice by Bob du Soe
Javelin of Death by Captain A.E. Dingle
The Screaming Skull by J. Allan Dunn
Six Shells Left by Allan R. Bosworth
Gods of Bastol by H.P. Holt
The Mindoon Maneater by C. M. Cross
The Spirit of France by S. B. H. Hurst
The Box of the Ivory Dragon by James L. Aton
Checkered Flag by Cliff Farrell
The Fighting Fool by Perley Poore Sheehan
Ghost Lanterns by Alan B. LeMay
Stories of the Legion: Choc by H. De Vere Stacpoole
The Whispering Corpse by Richard B. Sale
The Monkey God by Jacland Marmur
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High seas adventure done right
Jack Grey is the second mate on the steel sailing ship Carlyle, bound from San Francisco to Baltimore. With a sick captain and a cowardly first mate, Grey is the strongest and most capable man on board. Two passengers are along for the voyage: Miss Eversley, a beautiful, stuck-up young woman who looks down her nose at Grey as typical sailor riffraff, and Mr. Pathan, a creepy and suspicious character who relentlessly hits on the young woman. When the latter passenger incites the motley crew to mutiny, Grey takes it upon himself to save the lady from his barbarous shipmates.
Jack Grey, Second Mate, a novella by British author William Hope Hodgson, was originally published in the July 1917 issue of the pulp magazine Adventure. At first it seems like a blatant rip-off of Jack London’s 1914 novel The Mutiny of the Elsinore. It features the same type of ship, manned by a similar crew of lowlife scum, with the same points of departure and arrival. Grey bears a striking resemblance to Mr. Pike, the ruthlessly violent first mate of London’s novel. Even the passengers’ names are similar—Pathan vs. Pathurst. But whereas London’s novel is long, boring, and racist, Hodgson’s story is lively, exciting, and fun.
The fight scenes are very well-depicted, with a level of brutality that is quite surprising for its day. Grey has more in common with the laconic antiheroes of today’s movies than he does with the chivalrous gentlemen so common in the pulp fiction of the early 20th century. Like all damsel-in-distress stories, this one can be formulaic at times, but some memorable scenes of gritty realism elevate this one above run-of-the-mill nautical adventures. Though Hodgson never uses the word “rape,” he makes it quite clear that’s the fate that awaits Miss Eversley should Grey ever succumb to the attacks of the mutineers. 21st-century readers will appreciate that Hodgson faces such matters bluntly and doesn’t sugarcoat the savagery of the situation for the sake of some antiquated code of propriety. Hodgson’s prose is as clear and energetic as a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle caper, but his outlook is as bleak and harsh as a Robert E. Howard gorefest.
Hodgson was a prolific fiction writer who was known for his seafaring tales but penned stories in a wide variety of genres including horror and science fiction. I had never heard of him before this, but after reading Jack Grey, Second Mate, I’m certainly going to seek out more of his work.
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