William Hope Hodgson's The Boats of the "Glen Carrig"

All that night we rowed, keeping very strictly to the centre of the big creek, and all about us bellowed the vast growling, being more fearsome than ever I had heard it, until it seemed to me that we had waked all that land of terror to a knowledge of our presence.

The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" by William Hope Hodgson is part of a cosmic horror-themed trilogy along with The House on the Borderland and The Ghost Pirates. Its plot is simple - after the titular ship has an accident, its crew and a passenger escape in 2 boats and end up lost in a sea filled with strange phenomena - and allows Hodgson to just take them from one weird situation to the next.

The novel starts with the men already in the boats, dealing with dwindling supplies. They hope to find some in a shipwreck, but instead nearly suffer the fate of its previous occupants. Like in Hodgson's other stories, the phenomena aren't conventional and don't expect any detailed explanations. However, there are plenty of eerie descriptions, as the men realize that there's something outside the other ship and it sounds hungry. The snippets of a diary found aboard don't help calm their nerves. In the end of their time there, we get hints of what happened to the ship's passengers and crew, with a pretty creepy scene involving evil fungoid trees. (Because of course, there's evil fungi). This is followed by a massive, weird storm, that leaves only one boat. What could’ve been an indication to readers of how real the danger is, is undone by the nameless narrator matter-of-factly adding that the other boat had not only not been destroyed by the storm and all its occupants killed, but also that they had been rescued by another ship and taken back to England. Even weirder, was how no one ever mentioned the other boat again, though, at the time, they were fully convinced their friends had all died. Did Hodgson just decide he didn't want so many characters? But then why not actually kill them? Surely people in 1907 wouldn't stop reading over that?

After the storm, the remaining boat is left adrift in a sea filled with seaweed, giant crabs, giant squids, and shipwrecks of various ages that signal to the men that they might be stuck there forever. The squids are called 'devilfish', but I'm pretty sure they're squids. Of course, this means we get some tentacled horror, as the devilfish attacks the boat. This and the giant crabs' attacks reveal the bosun's enthusiasm for ocular violence. Really, there was a lot of eye poking with a pointy stick. In the seaweed sea, apart from these more conventional marine monsters, they find an island with a valley of stinky fungi (more fungi!) and a pit going down somewhere that no one cares to find out. Things get weird again with some very creepy vampire creatures that attack more than once. They kill some of the crew and nearly cost the narrator his small toe. The latter was pretty underwhelming. There are some good descriptions, and the stinky, slimy vampires were creepy and gross. Oh, and of course, they were coming from the pit. (By the way, this reminded me of The House on the Borderland. It was my first book by Hodgson and my expectations were different. Looking back, I may have been a little too harsh, as that's the best of the Cosmic Horror batch)

While they're on the island, the men of the Glen Carrig also find other survivors in one of the shipwrecks. Their attempts at communicating and finding a way to get to the ship takes up a lot of page-time in these last chapters. The worst offender being Chapter XII: The Making of the Great Bow. I confess that I may have skimmed that particular chapter rather than carefully reading Hodgson's seemingly never-ending description of the making of the titular bow, and I’m sure I'll regret it if I ever end up in a weird island in a seaweed-filled sea. Hodgson's tendency to describe too much of the characters' routine got more and more out of control. Thankfully, he left bathroom breaks out of it. Unfortunately, he decided to add a last minute love interest for the narrator, which allowed him to inflict his terrible romance-writing skills on readers. It wasn’t as bad as in The Night Land, though. I was disappointed with how well the other survivors were. They had been stuck there for 7 years, among the scary marine life and slimy vampires, and only the Captain's wife went mad? And no one went evil? And how convenient that they had enough food to last years. In between the narrator talking about his budding romance, which already included a pet name for his beloved, there was time for one last slimy pit vampire attack. However, the novel clearly lost steam in these last moments.

VERDICT

The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" is uneven. There are some very good descriptions, and Hodgson maintained a generally eerie atmosphere throughout the novel. However, his tendency to overly describe the more mundane things affects the pacing, and can make some passages a chore to read. That he decided to add the speedy romance didn't help. Readers barely know these characters, and while we may want to follow their plight, it doesn’t mean we're interested in seeing the narrator awkwardly flirt with some new character we've spent even less time with. I wasn't crazy about the archaic English, but it was nowhere near as bad as in The Night Land. A lot of this novel is good, but Hodgson really needed an editor.

By Danforth