William Hope Hodgson

1877–1918

William Hope Hodgson was born in Essex in 1877, one of the twelve children of a clergyman. He ran away to sea at thirteen and spent eight years as a sailor, winning a medal for saving another man from the shark-filled sea off New Zealand. Back on land he opened a school of physical culture in Blackburn, and then turned to writing.

The sea and its terrors fill his stories, and in a few short years he wrote the novels that made his name among lovers of the strange: The Boats of the Glen Carrig, The House on the Borderland, The Ghost Pirates and The Night Land. He joined the Royal Field Artillery in the First World War and was killed by a shell near Ypres in April 1918, aged forty.

Where to start?

The House on the Borderland: The short one: a siege, then the end of the solar system.
The Night Land: His longest and strangest book, a love story at the end of time.

William Hope Hodgson on the site

The Night LandPublished in 1912 About 14 hours read Millions of years from now the sun has gone out. The last of humanity lives inside the Last Redoubt, a metal pyramid nearly eight miles high, while vast watching things sit motionless in the dark land around it. A young man inside hears a call from a girl in a second, forgotten pyramid, and goes out alone to find her. William Hope Hodgson's 1912 novel is a love story told in a strange, deliberately old-fashioned English, and one of the first great visions of the Earth's far future. The House on the BorderlandPublished in 1908 About 4 hours read Two friends on a fishing holiday in the west of Ireland find a ruin on the edge of a huge pit, and in the ruin a damp old manuscript. It is the diary of a recluse who lived there with his sister and his dog, Pepper. First pig-faced creatures climb out of the pit and lay siege to the house. Then, one night in his study, he watches the years begin to race past, until the Earth and the sun are dead. William Hope Hodgson's 1908 novel is a landmark of cosmic horror.

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