Introduction by Lin Carter
183 pages
Published 1907
Read from July 2 to July 3
Rating: 2 out of 5
The first novel from early weird-horror writer William Hope Hodgson, The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” is written as if it were an account from 1757 of events that happened even earlier. We begin in media res some time into this putative document, eliding over the wreck of the Glen Carrig, somewhere in the southern seas. We find the survivors in her two boats drifting toward lands and seas unknown — lands and seas where they are assailed by nocturnal cries, meet horrid monsters, and bumble onward to the next misadventure. It’s two parts Gulliver’s Travels, one part Fiend Folio.
Hodgson mimics the 1700s adventure novel formula — including, regrettably, its antique prose style — perhaps a bit too well. At one point some characters walk around a tree, a simple action which is adumbrated with the phrase “our circumnavigation of the great vegetable.” We are kept at arm’s-length from the characters, most of whom are never named; the action, which could have been a fun proto-D&D monster quest, is staid and prim.
There are nicely creepy images scattered here and there throughout the book: a tree trunk “soft as pulp under my fingers,” monstrous octopuses and prodigious crabs in a forest of giant mushrooms, thousands of tentacled humanoids swarming en masse up a cliff. These are few and far between, however. Most of the book is essentially mundane, covering the usual Robinson Crusoe terrain of obtaining fresh water, improvising weapons and shelter, plaiting rope, battening the boat down for a storm, etc. It isn’t bad by any means, but it isn’t quite the landmark in dreamlike creature-horror one might wish.
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