William Hope Hodgson's The Ghost Pirates
The thing, whatever it was, had come forward over the rail; but now, before the light, it recoiled with a queer, horrible litheness. It slid back, and down, and so out of sight. I have only a confused notion of a wet glistening Something, and two vile eyes.
In William Hope Hodgson's The Ghost Pirates, the crew of the Mortzestus must deal with ghostly invaders who haunt the ship at night. However, what started as merely unsettling slowly turns deadly, as the apparitions work towards a mysterious goal...
The sense of foreboding is present from the very first chapters, where Jessop, the narrator, learns that the previous crew left without being paid and sees his first ghost. The intruders keep silently showing up around the ship, while the crewmen are helpless to stop them and have no idea what they want. Then, as the ghosts' visits become more frequent, people start disappearing. Since this is Hodgson, it's not a common haunting - in fact, these ghosts may not be ghosts at all. Jessop theorizes that there's more than one world and that the ship may somehow be vulnerable to incursions from the other side. The rest of the crew is desperate to find land, but he realizes that, while the sea around them may look normal, the ship has been cut off from their world and if they were to find land, they likely wouldn't even see it. It's a scary situation, with the crew unable to do anything but wait for the invaders to finish whatever they're doing. There are also some great descriptions, like the ghost ship, both in the mist and underwater, and the end of the Mortzestus. This is all good and spooky, but unfortunately, some of Hodgson's choices undermine what could've been a much better novel.
The novel starts with a sea shanty, which while appropriate for this nautical horror tale, goes on for way too long. Hodgson also uses phonetic spelling throughout, though it's still more legible than the entirety of The Night Land. His insistence in using nautical jargon, which isn't always easily understood, and describing too many of the characters' actions interfered with what should've been some more intense sequences. He did stop at one point, like he himself got tired of it. Shame that he didn't go over the manuscript again and fixed the rest before publication. It made sense to delay the revelations and have the pirates' actions slowly escalate to build up suspense, but the events in-between were repetitive and a wasted opportunity for developing the characters. It didn't help that the crew was frustratingly un-curious, and since the Second Mate and the Captain told Jessop to keep quiet about all the weirdness, we never got to see them react to his theories and belief that they wouldn't be able to find land because of the mist. The final confrontation would've had a greater effect, too, if most of the characters weren't just names. The ones that stand out more are Jessop, by virtue of being the narrator, and Tammy, one of the apprentices, who interacts more with him. Jessop may be perceptive, but he's also incredibly passive. He shows more personality in Chapter XVI, when he finishes telling his tale and Hodgson switches POV, than in the previous fifteen chapters. And what was the point of wasting page-time so close to the end by having the crew plan a mutiny because they're fed up with all the disappearances and how no one tells them what's going on and then have it go nowhere? All it did was provide yet another instance of Jessop's passivity, as he decides not to warn anyone of their plans, even though he knows how serious the situation is. Tammy may be a secondary character, but he feels more like an audience stand-in than Jessop, freaking out about the whole situation and insisting that they do something other than just wait around to be killed. Frankly, it doesn't seem Hodgson was good at dealing with a big cast of characters.
VERDICT
The Ghost Pirates is the weakest of the cosmic horror-themed trilogy (the other 2 novels are The House on the Borderland and The Boats of the Glen Carrig). It has some pretty good moments, and a good plot, but unfortunately, the way Hodgson told the story sometimes undermined its qualities. Jessop's narration is surprisingly bland considering what he's talking about, the characters remain woefully underdeveloped, and Hodgson's inability to stop describing everything is as annoying as ever. Still, the pirates are a scary threat, relentless and unstoppable, and the fact that they're never really explained actually makes them spookier.
By Danforth