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Rating: The figure of William H. Hodgson is fundamental in the realm of English supernatural literature: his dreamlike writing delves into the depths of the human psyche and draws out unsettling ghosts from the subconscious, often taking the symbolic form of hideous swine-like beasts.
Born in 1875 in Essex to an Anglican pastor, his life was marked by adventure and courage. As a young man, he embarked as a cabin boy and experienced the harsh life at sea: however, it was this maritime life, with its atmosphere laden with eerie silence and solitude, that provided him with the inspiration for setting some memorable stories and for two novels (The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" and The Ghost Pirates) full of mystery and unknown exotic landscapes, often haunted by not very reassuring entities not of this world.
Hodgson unfortunately does not enjoy the fame he deserves, considering that he, along with H.P. Lovecraft, is certainly one of the giants of "weird" fantastic literature. It was, in fact, the Arkham House, the publishing house founded by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei to spread and preserve the Lovecraftian narrative "corpus", that reprinted "The House on the Borderland", his masterpiece novel, in 1946. It should be noted how Lovecraft was significantly impressed by the narrative of the English writer, to whom he dedicated many pages in his well-known essay Supernatural Horror in Literature. Lovecraft praised his grand cosmic imagination and was undoubtedly influenced by it, as can be appreciated in the famous story "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", where the amphibious beings described by Lovecraft have more than an affinity with the teratoform entities of "The House on the Borderland". There are parallels with "Hodgsonian" themes that can be seen, especially in stories set at sea, in the works of another great writer of the fantastic: Jean Ray, and particularly in his masterpiece story "The Psalter of Mayence," in which a ship is projected into extraterrestrial dimensions.
In 1908, Hodgson wrote The House on the Borderland: this book is one of those gems that deserve to be rediscovered and republished, but the chronic laziness of current publishing is unfortunately not encouraging in this regard. In Italy, curiously, the novel initially came out in 1953, in one of the first numbers of Urania, in a "cut" and condensed version with the curious title "Beyond the Future", under the direction of Giorgio Monicelli. This demonstrates how the delirious extra-sensory cosmic journeys described in this novel have many points of contact with science fiction. Finally, The House on the Borderland was published in 1963 in the anthology "Universo a sette incognite" edited by Fruttero and Lucentini, although in a non-integral version: the two well-known curators did not hesitate, however, to call it "an unknown masterpiece". It is indeed a "nightmare" novel that describes the anxious vicissitudes of a "recluse", a resident of a remote Irish house, located in a region unknown to maps, which becomes the center where hallucinating and diabolical extra-cosmic powers unleash, taking the form of horrifying creatures with a swine-like appearance. The abysses that lie beneath the house from which these extraterrestrial beings emerge are a metaphor for the unfathomable secrets of the human subconscious. The book can be "read" both on a microcosmic and macrocosmic level.
The other great masterpiece novel of the English "maitre" is "The Night Land", intended as his most ambitious work. In reality, the book suffers from excessive length, but once again Hodgson's overflowing and disruptive imagination leaves its mark: the desolate image of the fortress is unforgettable, where in a very remote future, the last human beings hide, in a cold and hostile cosmos where the sun has gone out (the theme will also characterize the "Zothique" cycle by Clark Ashton Smith).
This great master of the fantastic is also remembered for creating the figure of the occult investigator Carnacki: a character who stands in the path of various John Silence by Blackwood and Dr. Hesselius by Le Fanu, with many affinities to the famous Harry Dickson by Jean Ray.
William Hope Hodgson would tragically die in 1918 during World War I, in which he participated as a volunteer.
Essential Italian Bibliography
The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" (Fanucci – 1974 – 1989)
The Ghost Pirates (Fanucci – 1986)
The House on the Borderland (Classici Urania no. 237 – 1996)
The Night Land (Fanucci – 1996)
Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder (The Books of Fear 4 – Siad Edizioni – 1978)
The House on the Borderland (comic adaptation by Richard Corben and Simon Revelstroke – Magic Press – 2004)
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