| William Hope Hodgson |
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Information AboutWilliam Hope Hodgson |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON | |
| 1877 births | |
| hodgson, william hope | |
| 1918 deaths | |
| english fantasy writers | |
| english horror writers | |
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Born November 15 1877 in Blackmore End , Essex , Hodgson ran away to sea at the age of thirteen and eventually served in the Merchant Marine . After a "body-building" business venture failed he decided to support himself by writing. His early works, "The Voice in the Night" and '' The Boats Of The "Glen Carrig" '', were based on his experiences at sea. Hodgson's works are chiefly in the occult or horror genre. Despite his often laboured and clumsy language, there is a critical consensus that he achieves a deep power of expression, which focuses on a sense not only of terror but of the ubiquity of ''potential'' terror, of the thinness of the invisible bound between the world of normalcy and an underlying reality for which humans are not suited. His two chief achievements are the novels '''', a sombre vision of a sunless far-future world. Lovecraft observed of ''The Night Land'' that it was "seriously marred" by repetitiousness, verbosity, and "nauseatingly sticky romantic sentimentality", but added that, for all these flaws, it was one of the "most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written." {Link without Title} '' The Ghost Pirates '' has less of a reputation than ''The House on the Borderland'', but is an effective seafaring horror story of a ship attacked and ultimately dragged down to its doom by supernatural creatures. The book purports to be the spoken testimony of the sole survivor, and the style lacks the pseudo- Archaism which makes ''The Boats of the "Glen Carrig"'' and ''The Night Land'' tedious reading for many. Hodgson also created the "detective of the occult" Thomas Carnacki , who appeared in several short stories. When World War I began, Hodgson enlisted in the Royal Artillery . He was discharged after a head injury, but afterward re-enlisted. He was killed by an artillery shell at Ypres on April 17 1918 . WORKS
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