Lovecraft on Hodgson

I found this interesting excerpt online. It’s taken from HP Lovecraft’s essay Supernatural Horror in Literature.

He’s rather scathing of the Carnacki stories, which I’m rather fond of. Oh well. I think the professional occultism of the Carnacki stories is key to their charm personally, but I’ll leave further comment on that until I write up the stories themselves.

In the meantime, here’s the man from Providence himself:

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.

In The Boats of the Glen Carrig (1907) we are shown a variety of malign marvels and accursed unknown lands as encountered by the survivors of a sunken ship. The brooding menace in the earlier parts of the book is impossible to surpass, though a letdown in the direction of ordinary romance and adventure occurs toward the end. An inaccurate and pseudo-romantic attempt to reproduce eighteenth-century prose detracts from the general effect, but the really profound nautical erudition everywhere displayed is a compensating factor.

The House on the Borderland (1908) — perhaps the greatest of all Mr. Hodgson’s works — tells of a lonely and evilly regarded house in Ireland which forms a focus for hideous otherworld forces and sustains a siege by blasphemous hybrid anomalies from a hidden abyss below. The wanderings of the Narrator’s spirit through limitless light-years of cosmic space and Kalpas of eternity, and its witnessing of the solar system’s final destruction, constitute something almost unique in standard literature. And everywhere there is manifest the author’s power to suggest vague, ambushed horrors in natural scenery. But for a few touches of commonplace sentimentality this book would be a classic of the first water.

The Ghost Pirates (1909), regarded by Mr. Hodgson as rounding out a trilogy with the two previously mentioned works, is a powerful account of a doomed and haunted ship on its last voyage, and of the terrible sea-devils (of quasi-human aspect, and perhaps the spirits of bygone buccaneers) that besiege it and finally drag it down to an unknown fate. With its command of maritime knowledge, and its clever selection of hints and incidents suggestive of latent horrors in nature, this book at times reaches enviable peaks of power.

The Night Land (1912) is a long-extended (538 pp.) tale of the earth’s infinitely remote future-billions of billions of years ahead, after the death of the sun. It is told in a rather clumsy fashion, as the dreams of a man in the seventeenth century, whose mind merges with its own future incarnation; and is seriously marred by painful verboseness, repetitiousness, artificial and nauseously sticky romantic sentimentality, and an attempt at archaic language even more grotesque and absurd than that in Glen Carrig.

Allowing for all its faults, it is yet one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written. The picture of a night-black, dead planet, with the remains of the human race concentrated in a stupendously vast metal pyramid and besieged by monstrous, hybrid, and altogether unknown forces of the darkness, is something that no reader can ever forget: Shapes and entities of an altogether non-human and inconceivable sort — the prowlers of the black, man-forsaken, and unexplored world outside the pyramid — are suggested and partly described with ineffable potency; while the night-land landscape with its chasms and slopes and dying volcanism takes on an almost sentient terror beneath the author’s touch. Midway in the book the central figure ventures outside the pyramid on a quest through death-haunted realms untrod by man for millions of years — and in his slow, minutely described, day-by-day progress over unthinkable leagues of immemorial blackness there is a sense of cosmic alienage, breathless mystery, and terrified expectancy unrivalled in the whole range of literature. The last quarter of the book drags woefully, but fails to spoil the tremendous power of the whole. Mr. Hodgson’s later volume, Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, consists of several longish short stories published many years before in magazines. In quality it falls conspicuously below the level of the other books. We here find a more or less conventional stock figure of the “infallible detective” type — the progeny of M. Dupin and Sherlock Holmes, and the close kin of Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence — moving through scenes and events badly marred by an atmosphere of professional “occultism.” A few of the episodes, however, are of undeniable power, and afford glimpses of the peculiar genius characteristic of the author.

I love Lovecraft dearly. A flawed writer, but one who deserves his recent and very belated recognition by Penguin Modern Classics. At his worst, his writing was racist and overwrought. At his best, it was weird in the finest sense of that word. I’ll write about him more another day, though I have an adolescent fondness for him which makes impartiality difficult.

Philip Hensher corrects me on my commas

Correctly, to be fair to him, if unkindly.

It’s in the context of a discussion of Orlando Figes’ wife’s Amazon reviews and the defensibility of anonymous online reviews more generally. The discussion is over at the Guardian’s book blogs, here.

Ghosts in the machine

Epublishing and the short story

Publishers don’t like short stories. Why? Because the public don’t like them. Short stories don’t sell.

Back in the 1980s, when I was a kid, I only read science fiction (well, and some fantasy and horror but let’s not let facts get in the way). Every now and then a science fiction writer would bring out a short story collection, but science fiction fans seem to like short stories even less than other people, how to sell them?

The answer used to be to pretend they were novels. The back cover would talk about one of the stories as if it were the whole book, any trace of evidence that it was a short story collection was expunged. You bought a book about strange discoveries on a Jovian moon or whatever and it was only when you started reading you made your own strange discovery, that you’d bought a short story collection.

Times haven’t changed that much, I don’t think that sort of outright deception is common now (though it wouldn’t surprise me if it came back), but the antipathy to short stories is still with us. Except, and so far it’s only a little exception in the West, there’s a new medium which is perfectly suited to the short story.

At the moment, I’m reading Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust. It’s brilliant, but it needs attention and I’m working long hours. I’m not getting time to get stuck into it, so in the meantime I’ve been reading some short stories. That’s not so unusual, what’s unusual for me is where I’ve been reading them – on my phone.

I recently bought an iPhone, it has ereader software on it, so I browsed online to see what was available free. While there, I spotted an old favourite, William Hope Hodgson’s Edwardian ghost stories, Carnacki the Ghost Finder. I downloaded it, and just finished the last story in the download.

Now, Carnacki was published in two editions, the 1913 edition with six stories and a 1947 edition with nine. The version I downloaded was the 1913 one, so I’ve ordered the 1947 version in normal book form and I’ll write up the whole thing as soon as I’ve read the last three. For the moment though, I thought it worth a post about reading on the iPhone.

The first thing is, you have a pretty small screen, about two paragraphs worth at a time. The visual display isn’t nearly as friendly as paper either, so you don’t want to read it for too long at a sitting. That makes novels a drag, I read a while back Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage on my then PDA, but the format did the novel no favours.

Short stories though, that’s a different matter. They don’t take that long to read, they also don’t benefit from reading too many at one sitting. In fact, my problem with short stories normally is that I struggle to stop myself reading a collection like a novel, so diminishing their individual impact.

With the Carnacki stories, I read one at a time, days apart, when I had a spare moment. I was stuck working long hours, opportunities to read rare, but I had my phone on me. When tired, travelling in a taxi home, the light’s not good enough for a book but the phone is backlit. Put simply, it works.

Now, I’m not the only one discovering that short stories work ok on a phone. There are dedicated apps, both general ereaders and now one designed for short stories. Publishers are starting to look closely at iPhone releases. Some are already arguing that smartphones are the real ereading revolution, bypassing Kindles and Sony eReaders and the like. People like their phones, increasingly they’re accustomed to consuming content (to use a horrific phrase) on them. Novels don’t work, but short stories do.

And of course I’m not even talking here about the Japanese experience, where there’s been an explosion in mobile phone based short story collections (mostly I’m not talking about it as I’m not persuaded it’s transferable outside Japan actually).

Here‘s a link to Ether Books, a company hoping to make a living by publishing short stories on mobile phones. Note the author list, Hilary Mantel, Alexander McCall Smith, the company’s still in the process of its launch but what’s immediately noticeable is that the author list isn’t just the usual bunch of out of copyright material taken from Project Guttenberg. Some of these are living authors I’ve actually heard of…

So, the smartphone, a new venue for the short story. I don’t think it’s guaranteed, but I think it’s a definite possibility as a new market, a new way of bringing short stories to people. And it frees the story from the collection, a format which isn’t always to an author’s benefit.

On a last note, apart from smartphones and digital delivery, I’m also reading a format called Picador Shots. Tiny format books containing a couple of short stories, essentially a sampler for a writer. Penguin has of course tried similar concepts, taking a small excerpt of a larger work or a single short story and publishing that in a back-pocket-sized paperback. It works, but it’s not as good as the smartphone option. The book doesn’t fit well on a shelf, it’s lost among its neighbours, but on the plus side it’s a quick read and easily thrown in a pocket or bag.

Going back to the ’80s, I recall we liked science fiction short stories in magazines, there was appetite for the form. Just not for collections. Sometimes a collection exists because of a thematic unity, but more often I think it’s just because books are sold in certain sizes and to get a short story to the desired size you have to package it with several of its fellows. Trouble is, when people buy a book of that size, they tend to expect a single narrative they can immerse in.

Free the short story of the collection, and you might encourage people to read them a bit more.

For the curious, here‘s a Guardian article about that Ether Books company, they’re not unique though, they just seem so far the most ambitious.