Weird novelist and short story writer who died in Belgium during World War I. He wrote four novels — The Boats of the “Glen Carrig”(1907), The House on the Borderland(1908), The Ghost Pirates (1909), and The Night Land(1912)—all written around 1902–5, probably published in reverse order (see Gafford). There is also a story collection, Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder(1913), imitating Blackwood’s “psychic detective,” John Silence. HPL read Hodgson in 1934 at the urging of bibliophile Herman C. Koenig, who was circulating his Hodgson volumes among HPL’s circle. HPL wrote an enthusiastic article, “The Weird Work of William Hope Hodgson” ( Phantagraph,February 1937), and added a section on him for a putative revised version of “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (this revised version was not published until its appearance in O). The cosmic terror of The House on the Borderlandand The Night Landmay have influenced “The Shadow out of Time.” Much of Hodgson’s work was collected and published posthumously. HPL’s enthusiasm for Hodgson’s work no doubt influenced August Derleth’s decision to republish much of it through Arkham House. See Sam Moskowitz, “William Hope Hodgson,” in Hodgson’s Out of the Storm(1975); William Hope Hodgson: Voyages and Visions,ed. Ian Bell (1987); Sam Gafford, “Writing Backwards: The Novels of William Hope Hodgson,” Studies in Weird FictionNo. 11 (Spring 1992): 12–15.
Holm, Axel (1612–1687).
In “The Trap,” a Danish scholar expert in both glass working and magic who designs a mirror that can draw human beings and other
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objects into a strange fourth-dimensional world within itself. He achieves a kind of immortality in this manner (so long as the mirror itself is intact), but finds existence to be extremely tiresome, enlivened only by drawing other people into the mirror-world.
Holt, Ebenezer.
In “The Picture in the House,” the eighteenth-century merchant from Salem who trades to the aged cannibal of the story a copy of Pigafetta’s Regnum Congo
“Homes and Shrines of Poe.”
Essay (2,010 words); written in July 1934. First published in the Californian(Winter 1934); rpt. Acolyte(Fall 1943); rpt. MW. A brief survey of Poe <s residences in Philadelphia, Richmond, Charlottesville, Baltimore, New York, and Fordham, all of which HPL had personally visited. Hornig, Charles D[erwin]
(1916–1999), youthful editor of The Fantasy Fan(September 1933–February 1935), the first important fanzine in weird fiction. Hornig, residing in Elizabeth, N.J., accepted HPL’s offer to serialize a revised version of “Supernatural Horror in Literature” there, but the serialization had progressed only to the middle of Chapter 8 by the time of magazine’s folding. Over much of the period he was editing The Fantasy Fan,Horning was also managing editor of Wonder Stories(1933–36). On May 25, 1935 (his nineteenth birthday), he met HPL in Providence. He edited Science Fiction(1939–41), Future Fiction(1939–40), and Science Fiction Quarterly(1940–41) but abandoned them all by 1941. “Horror at Martin’s Beach, The.”
Short story (2,410 words); written in collaboration with Sonia H.Greene, probably in June 1922. First published (as “The Invisible Monster”) in WT(November 1923); first collected in Cats;corrected text in HM.
The crew of a fishing smack kills a sea creature “fifty feet in length, of roughly cylindrical shape, and about ten feet in diameter” at Martin’s Beach (an unspecified and imaginary locale, but presumably near Gloucester, Mass., which is mentioned several times). Scientists prove the creature to be a mere infant, hatched only a few days previously and probably originating from the deep sea; the day after it is placed on exhibition, it and the vessel that caught it disappear without a trace. Some days later a terrified cry for help emerges from the sea, and the lifeguards throw out a life-preserver to assist the stricken individual; but the life-preserver, attached to a long rope, appears to have been grasped by some nameless entity that pulls it out to sea, and when the lifeguards and other individuals attempt to reel it in, they not only find themselves unable to do so, but also find that they cannot release the rope. They are inexorably dragged to their deaths in the sea. The idea is that the parent of the infant creature has not only grasped the life-preserver but also hypnotized the rescuers so that their wills no longer function. (This is why Prof. Alton’s article “Are Hypnotic Powers Confined to Recognized Humanity?” is cited early in the text.) The tale bears a striking (but accidental) similarity to the British horror film Gorgo(1961).
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“Horror at Red Hook, The.”
Short story (8,400 words); written on August 1–2, 1925. First published in WT(January 1927); first collected in BWS;corrected text in D;annotated version in An2
Thomas Malone, an Irish police detective working from the Borough Hall station in Brooklyn (near the racially heterogeneous slum known as Red Hook), becomes interested in the case of Robert Suydam, a wealthy man of ancient Dutch ancestry who lives in Flatbush. Suydam first attracts notice by “loitering on the benches around Borough Hall in conversation with groups of swarthy, evil-looking strangers.” He realizes that his clandestine activities must be masked by a façade of propriety; he foils the attempts of relatives to deem him legally incompetent by ceasing to be seen with the foreigners and marries Cornelia Gerritsen, “a young woman of excellent position” whose wedding attracts “a solid page from the Social Register.” The wedding celebration held aboard a steamer at the Cunard Pier ends in horror as the couple is found horribly murdered and completely bloodless. Incredibly, officials follow the instructions written on a sheet of paper, signed by Suydam, and turn his body over to a suspicious group of men headed by “an Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth.” The scene shifts to a dilapidated church in Red Hook that has been turned into a dance-hall, in the basement of which loathsome monstrosities perform horrible rites to Lilith. Suydam’s corpse, miraculously revivified, resists being sacrificed to Lilith and somehow manages to overturn the pedestal on which she rests (with the result that the corpse sends “its noisome bulk floundering to the floor in a state of jellyish dissolution”), thereby somehow ending the horror. All this time detective Malone merely watches from a convenient vantage point, although the sight so traumatizes him that he must spend many months recuperating in a small village in Rhode Island. HPL notes in a letter to Frank Belknap Long that the story “deals with hideous cult-practices behind the gangs of noisy young loafers whose essential mystery has impressed me so much. The tale is rather long and rambling, and I don’t think it is very good; but it represents at least an attempt to extract horror from an atmosphere to which you deny any qualities save vulgar commonplaceness” ( SL2.20). HPL records in his 1925 diary that he visited Red Hook on March 8, 1925. Sonia H.Greene in her memoir claims to supply the inspiration for the tale: “It was on an evening while he, and I think Morton, Sam Loveman and Rheinhart Kleiner were dining in a restaurant somewhere in Columbia Heights that a few rough, rowdyish men entered. He was so annoyed by their churlish behavior that out of this circumstance he wove ‘The Horror at Red Hook’” ( The Private Life of H.P.Lovecraft[Necronomicon Press, 1992], p. 12). Whether it was any single incident, or the cumulative effect of HPL’s New York experience, that led to the writing of the story remains in doubt. There is much local color in the story, derived from HPL’s growing familiarity with Brooklyn. The dance-hall church is very likely modeled on a church (now destroyed) near the waterfront in Red Hook. This church was, evidently, actually once used as a dance hall. Suydam’s residence is said to be in Martense Street (very close to 259 Parkside) and near the Dutch Reformed Church (on which “The Hound” was based); probably no specific house is intended, and there does not seem to be any on Martense Street that might correspond to it.