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The magazine of fantastic and weird culture Zothique continues to be released with a certain regularity, curated by Pietro Guarriello and now in its eighth issue.
This time, the focus is on the great English writer William Hope Hodgson, who heavily influenced Lovecraft in the latter part of his life, as evidenced by the article dedicated to him by HPL in Supernatural Horror in Literature where he praises his cosmic horror and visionary imagination. Lately, the numbers of Zothique have been becoming increasingly substantial (this one is over 200 pages) and largely dedicated to a single author, as was the case with Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Bram Stoker, and Gustav Meyrink.
On this occasion, we find some really interesting contributions such as that of Sam Gafford who explains to us how the dating of Hodgson's novels needs to be completely revised. Thanks to the discovery of Hodgson's letters to colleague Coulson Kernahan, published for the first time in Italy right in this issue of Zothique, Sam Gafford manages to reconstruct their genesis. The surprise is that The House on the Borderland, recently reprinted by Fanucci, becomes the first novel he wrote. This is news that slightly disrupts some of the critic's explanations. As is known, Hodgson has been criticized for the excessively baroque and deliberately seventeenth-century style used in the cited novel, but previously it was thought to be an evolution (or involution depending on the point of view). As Gafford argues, the most probable explanation is that the Blackburn writer, at the beginning of his career, deliberately started writing in an antiquated way only to become disillusioned once he realized the lack of public response.
In any case, Sam Gafford's judgment is, in my opinion, too harsh on him: he judges his style as "agonizing" and, regarding The House on the Borderland, "slightly better". The Italian reader can get an idea of the value of his writing, which certainly does not reach the levels of Poe, by reading The House on the Borderland in the edition of Classi Urania curated by Gianfranco De Turris, reprinted in the recent anthology by Mondadori The Myths of Cthulhu. Subsequently, Hodgson will polish his stylistic approach, which, at times, is even too sloppy, with the stories and novels The Ghost Pirates and The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig'. Personally, I still prefer the baroque style of The House on the Borderland and The Night Land.
Among the other contributions, one very in-depth and full of insights is Journey into the Eternal Night: In Search of Some Sources of William Hope Hodgson by Piervittorio Formichetti. It is a very erudite essay in which Dante Alighieri (whom Hodgson had read), the Bible, and the tradition of Indian culture are mentioned. And it is precisely from the Bible that the English writer drew inspiration for his teratoscopic creatures and also for his famous swine-like beings. Extremely fitting is the comparison between the character from The House on the Borderland, who becomes estranged from himself witnessing the collapse of the solar system, and David Bowman, the surviving astronaut from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick, victim of a similar fate.
The other contributions are also good, among which are those by Mariano D’Anza and Christian Lamberti. The latter talks about how Hodgson composed a trilogy based on the concept of boundary (borderland) "understood as the frontier of reality and other stages of existence." There is also a translated short critical essay by Clark Ashton Smith who praises The Night Land, and it couldn't be otherwise since the concept of a dying land was then taken up by him in the Zothique cycle.
We also find two unpublished stories, namely The Mental Vampire and The Vengeance of the Pagan, stories that are somewhat bizarre and strange, departing from his typical themes.
The refined cover art is by Gino Carosini and the internal illustrations are, as usual, very numerous. There's also a poem by Jo. Dart illustrated by Federica Pasin. If you want to delve deeper into this author, this issue is simply unmissable.
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