William Hope Hodgson

William Hope Hodgson (born 15 November 1877 in Blackmore End, Essex; died April 1918) was an English author of horror, fantasy and science fiction in the early twentieth century. His body of work, written in English, influenced H. P. Lovecraft and is now often read as a bridge between Victorian storytelling and modern horror.

The son of an Anglican priest, he grew up as his family moved from one parish to another. At thirteen he tried to run away from boarding school to become a sailor. After a four-year apprenticeship and two years of study in Liverpool, he qualified as a mate in the merchant navy. The hardship of the work, and the bullying he suffered aboard ship, pushed him toward physical training and toward photographing the sea. Those years shaped much of what he later wrote.

Back on land, he opened a physical culture school in Blackburn and, in 1902, handcuffed the magician Harry Houdini during a stage act that caused controversy. When the school proved too seasonal to support him, he turned to writing articles and then fiction. His first story, “The Goddess of Death”, appeared in 1904, and in 1906 he published the first of his Sargasso Sea stories. His novels fall into two groups: sea tales such as The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” (1907) and The Ghost Pirates (1909), and cosmic horror such as The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912).

He wrote a good deal of poetry but published little of it in his lifetime. His widow issued several posthumous collections, and a 2005 volume brought together some forty-eight poems that had never appeared. He was killed fighting in the First World War at the age of forty. His legacy is twofold: his notion of forces indifferent to humanity influenced Lovecraft and much later horror, and his way of placing the supernatural at sea, with real sailors and technical detail, opened a path few writers of his time took.