Unfathomable Athenaeum: The Boats Of The 'Glen Carrig'

The Boats Of The 'Glen Carrig' By William Hope Hodgson

The first novel from Edwardian self-defence teacher Hodgson, whose horror stories inspired many writers of supernatural fiction throughout the century and beyond. Like Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, written almost 70 years previously, Glen Carrig is a maritime horror tale where the almost non-existent plot is merely a device in which to throw the protagonists from one unwholesome situation to another, emphasis being on the small, almost self contained set-pieces that appear throughout the narrative. 

Unlike Pym, which is very dry and in places dull because Poe mimicked factual books of the day in order to give his sea-quest a hint of realism, Glen Carrig is very dry and in places dull because Hodgson draws on his own lengthy experiences in the merchant navy to give his sea-quest a hint of realism. Only a minor criticism, as when he stops being a nerdy, boat-obsessed boy scout, Hodgson has managed in this book to write some of the most nightmarish visions and tension-ridden passages in horror fiction.

His ability to leave the worst of the horrors to the reader's imagination was copied far more clunky a fashion by the Horror Pope Lovecraft, but in these chapters the things that go bump in the night are rarely seen at all, leaving the atmosphere to really build by itself as the hapless crew try to survive every night, and when, unlike in the Lovecraft canon, the creatures are finally glimpsed they are not left as 'indescribable' or 'unnamable' but are described in as much detail that the narrator can allow.

Much like his Edwardian counterpart H.G. Wells, Hodgson is very much a grotesquophile - a big fan of tentacled monster 'devil fish' and the like, as well as strange plants and fungi and the unbelievable 'Weed Men' - sort of bottom-feeding, beaked slime-covered crosses between Tove Jansson's Hattifatteners and William Burrough's Mugwumps.

A bizarre book, well worth the read, if maybe there are a few too many passages on mizzenmasts and the correct construction of a bow and arrow. There is, however, something in this book, as well as Hodgson's other sea-stories, that bridge the gap between the traditional boy's own sea fable and the later space operas of the 20th Century, where the mizzenmasts have been replaced by self-aware space ships, tachyon beams and the like. The technological geekiness has just progressed along with the technology, the ideas of adventure, survival and alienation as well as the horror of the unknown have survived and this is certainly one of the important stepping stones on the way.