William Hope Hodgson William Hope Hodgson ( 15 November 1877 – April 1918 ) was an English author . He produced a large body of work , consisting of essays , short fiction , and novels , spanning several overlapping genres including horror , fantastic fiction and science fiction . Hodgson used his experiences at sea to lend authentic detail to his short horror stories , many of which are set on the ocean , including his series of linked tales forming the " Sargasso Sea Mythos " . His novels such as " The Night Land " and " The House on the Borderland " feature more cosmic themes , but several of his novels also focus on horrors associated with the sea . Early in his writing career he dedicated effort to poetry , although few of his poems were published during his lifetime . He also attracted some notice as a photographer and achieved some renown as a bodybuilder . He died in World War I at the age of 40 . Life . Early years and life at sea . Hodgson was born in Blackmore End , Essex , the son of Samuel Hodgson , an Anglican priest , and Lissie Sarah Brown . He was the second of twelve children , three of whom died in infancy . The death of a child is a theme in several of Hodgson ' s works including the short stories " The Valley of Lost Children " , " The Sea - Horses " , and " The Searcher of the End House " . Hodgson ' s father was moved frequently , and served 11 different parishes in 21 years , including one in County Galway , Ireland . This setting was later featured in Hodgson ' s novel " The House on the Borderland " . Hodgson ran away from his boarding school at the age of thirteen in an effort to become a sailor . He was caught and returned to his family , but eventually received his father ' s permission to be apprenticed as a cabin boy and began a four - year apprenticeship in 1891 . Hodgson ' s father died shortly thereafter , of throat cancer , leaving the family impoverished ; while William was away , the family subsisted largely on charity . After his apprenticeship ended in 1895 , Hodgson began two years of study in Liverpool , and was then able to pass the tests and receive his mate ' s certificate ; he then began several more years as a sailor . At sea , Hodgson experienced bullying . This led him to begin a program of personal training . According to Sam Moskowitz , The primary motivation of his body development was not health , but self - defence . His relatively short height and sensitive , almost beautiful face made him an irresistible target for bullying seamen . When they moved in to pulverize him , they would learn too late that they had come to grips with easily one of the most powerful men , pound for pound , in all England . The theme of bullying of an apprentice by older seamen , and revenge taken , appeared frequently in his sea stories . While away at sea , in addition to his exercises with weights and with a punching bag , Hodgson also practised his photography , taking photographs of cyclones , lightning , sharks , aurora borealis , and the maggots that infested the food given to sailors . He also built up a stamp collection , practised his marksmanship while hunting , and kept journals of his experiences at sea . In 1898 he was awarded the Royal Humane Society medal for heroism for saving another sailor who had fallen overboard in shark - infested waters . Physical culture , essays and poetry . In 1899 , at the age of 22 , he opened W . H . Hodgson ' s School of Physical Culture , in Blackburn , England , offering tailored exercise regimes for personal training . Among his customers were members of the Blackburn police force . In 1902 , Hodgson himself appeared on stage with handcuffs and other restraining devices supplied by the Blackburn police department and applied the restraints to Harry Houdini , who had previously escaped from the Blackburn city jail . His behavior towards Houdini generated controversy ; the escape artist had some difficulty removing his restraints , complaining that Hodgson had deliberately injured him and jammed the locks of his handcuffs . Hodgson was not shy of publicity , and in another notable stunt , rode a bicycle down a street so steep that it had stairs , an event written up in the local paper . Despite his reputation , he eventually found that he could not earn a living running his personal training business , which was seasonal in nature , and shut it down . He began instead writing articles such as " Physical Culture versus Recreative Exercises " ( published in 1903 ) . One of these articles , " Health from Scientific Exercise , " featured photographs of Hodgson himself demonstrating his exercises . The market for such articles seemed to be limited , however ; so , inspired by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe , H . G . Wells , Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle , Hodgson turned his attention to fiction , publishing his first short story , " The Goddess of Death " , in 1904 , followed shortly by " A Tropical Horror " . He also contributed to an article in " The Grand Magazine " , taking the " No " side in a debate on the topic " Is the Mercantile Navy Worth Joining ? " In this piece , Hodgson laid out in detail his negative experiences at sea , including facts and figures about salaries . This led to a second article in " The Nautical Magazine " , an exposé on the subject of apprenticeships ; at the time , families often were forced to pay to have boys accepted as apprentices . Hodgson began to give paid lectures , illustrated with his photography in the form of colorized slides , about his experiences at sea . Although he wrote a number of poems , only a handful were published during his lifetime ; several , such as " Madre Mia " , appeared as dedications to his novels . Apparently cynical about the prospects of publishing his poetry , in 1906 he published an article in " The Author " magazine , suggesting that poets could earn money by writing inscriptions for tombstones . Many of his poems were published by his widow in two posthumous collections , but some 48 poems were not published until their appearance in the 2005 collection " The Lost Poetry of William Hope Hodgson " . Career in fiction , and marriage . Hodgson ' s first short story was " The Goddess of Death " ( 1904 ) , in which he utilised a statue of Flora which stood in Blackburn Park as the focus of a tale in which a Hindu statue , seized from an Indian temple , stood in a small English town . The statue comes alive to take its revenge on the people who stole it . " The Royal Magazine " published the story in April 1904 . In 1906 the American magazine " The Monthly Story Magazine " published " From the Tideless Sea " " , the first of Hodgson ' s Sargasso Sea stories . Hodgson continued to sell stories to American magazines as well as British magazines for the remainder of his career , carefully managing the rights to his work in order to maximize his remuneration . While still living with his mother in relative poverty , his first published novel , " The Boats of the " Glen Carrig " " , appeared in 1907 , to positive reviews . Hodgson also published ' " The Voice in the Night " the same year , as well as " Through the Vortex of a Cyclone " , a realistic story inspired by Hodgson ' s experiences at sea and illustrated with tinted slides made from his own photographs . Hodgson also explored the subject of ships and cyclones in his story " The Shamraken Homeward - Bounder " , published in 1908 . Also in 1908 , Hodgson published his second novel , " The House on the Borderland " , again to positive reviews , as well as an unusual satirical science fiction story , , a Swiftian satire in which it is suggested that war should be carried out by men fighting in pens with knives , and the corpses carefully salvaged for food , although in letters to the editor published at the time , he expressed strong patriotic sentiments . In 1909 , he published " Out of the Storm " , a short horror story about " the death - side of the sea , " in which the protagonist drowning in a storm rants about the horrors of a storm at sea . According to Moskowitz , This story proved an emotional testament beyond all other evidence . Hodgson , whose literary success would be in a large measure based on the impressions he received at sea , actually hated and feared the waters with an intensity that was the passion of his life . Also in 1909 , Hodgson published another novel , " The Ghost Pirates " . In the foreword , he wrote that it . . . completes what , perhaps , may be termed a trilogy ; for , though very different in scope , each of the three books deals with certain conceptions that have an elemental kinship . This book , the author believes that he closes the door , so far as he is concerned , on a particular phase of constructive thought . " The Bookman " magazine in its review of the novel in 1909 included the comment : We can only hope that Mr . Hodgson may be induced to reconsider his decision , for we know of nothing like the author ' s previous work in the whole of present - day literature . Despite the critical success of his novels , Hodgson remained relatively poor . To try to bolster his income from short story sales , he began working on the first of his recurring characters : the Carnacki character , featured in several of his most famous stories and partly inspired by Algernon Blackwood ' s occult detective John Silence . The first of these , " The Gateway of the Monster " , was published in 1910 in " The Idler " . In 1910 Hodgson also published " The Captain of the Onion Boat " , an unusual story that combines a nautical tale and a romance . He continued to publish many stories and non - fiction pieces , occasionally resorting to the use of recycled plot elements and situations , sometimes to the annoyance of his publishers . His last novel to see publication , " The Night Land " , was published in 1912 , although it likely had its genesis a number of years earlier . Hodgson also worked on a 10 , 000 - word novelette version of the novel , now known as " The Dream of X " . He continued to branch out into related genres , publishing " Judge Barclay ' s Wife " , a western adventure , in the United States , as well as several non - supernatural mystery stories and the science fiction story " The Derelict " , and even war stories ( several of the Captain Gault tales feature wartime themes ) . In 1912 , Hodgson married Betty Farnworth , known also as Bessie , a girl from Cheadle Hulme and a staff member who wrote the ' agony ' column for the women ' s magazine " Home Notes " . Both were thirty - five . She gave up her job after they married on 26 February 1913 , in the London borough of Kensington . They moved to the south of France and took up residence there , owing in part to the low cost of living . Hodgson began a work entitled " Captain Dang ( An account of certain peculiar and somewhat memorable adventures ) " and continued to publish stories in multiple genres , although financial security continued to elude him . When war broke out in Europe , the Hodgsons returned to England . Later life , World War I experience and death . Hodgson returned with his wife to England . He joined the University of London ' s Officers ' Training Corps . Refusing to have anything to do with the sea despite his experience and Third Mate ' s certificate , he received a commission as a Lieutenant in the Royal Artillery . In 1916 he was thrown from a horse and suffered a broken jaw and a serious head injury ; he received a mandatory discharge , and returned to writing . Refusing to remain on the sidelines , Hodgson recovered sufficiently to re - enlist . His published articles and stories from the time reflect his experience in war . He was killed by an artillery shell at Ypres in April 1918 ; sources suggest either the 17th or 19th . He was eulogized in " The Times " on 2 May 1918 . The American magazine " Adventure " , to which Hodgson had contributed fiction , also ran an obituary which reprinted a clipping from his widow , describing how Hodgson led a group of NCOs to safety under heavy fire . Most famous works . Hodgson is most widely known for two works . " The House on the Borderland " is a novel of which H . P . Lovecraft wrote " but for a few touches of commonplace sentimentality [ it ] would be a classic of the first water " . " The Night Land " is a much longer novel , written in an archaic style and expressing a sombre vision of a sunless far - future world . These works both contain elements of science fiction , although they also partake of horror and the occult . According to critical consensus , in these works , despite his often laboured and clumsy language , Hodgson achieves a deep power of expression , which focuses on a sense not only of terror but of the ubiquity of " potential " terror , of the thinness of the invisible boundary between the world of normality and an underlying , unaccountable reality for which humans are not suited . " The Ghost Pirates " has less of a reputation than " The House on the Borderland " , but is an effective seafaring horror story of a ship attacked and ultimately dragged down to its doom by supernatural creatures . The book purports to be the spoken testimony of the sole survivor , and the style lacks the pseudo - archaism which makes " The Boats of the " Glen Carrig " " and " The Night Land " tedious reading for many . Hodgson is also known for his short stories featuring recurring characters : the " detective of the occult " Thomas Carnacki , and the smuggler Captain Gault . The Carnacki story " The Whistling Room " has been reprinted in numerous anthologies , including collections introduced by Alfred Hitchcock . Hodgson ' s single most famous short story is probably " The Voice in the Night " , which has been adapted for film twice . Another story regarded highly by critics is " The Shamraken Homeward - Bounder " . It is claimed that Hodgson was an influence on H . P . Lovecraft , even though Lovecraft didn ' t read his works until 1934 . In a 2009 essay , China Miéville traces the origin of " the tentacle " as an object of horror to Hodgson ' s " The Boats of the " Glen Carrig " " . Hodgson ' s literary estate . Hodgson ' s widow , Bessie , worked to keep his books in print , and to publish works he was not able to get published during his lifetime . This work included two books of poetry . After Bessie Hodgson died in 1943 , Hodgson ' s sister Lissie took over his literary estate . While the first six Carnacki stories were collected during Hodgson ' s lifetime , " The Haunted Jarvee " appeared posthumously in 1929 , and two more Carnacki stories , " The Find " and " The Hog , " were not published until 1947 by August Derleth . Some critics suspected that Derleth might actually be the author of these two stories , but that theory has been discounted . One Captain Gault story , " The Plans of the Reefing Bi - Plane , " was not published until 1996 , when it was included in the short story collection " Terrors of the Sea " . Some of Hodgson ' s poems were first published in 2005 , when they appeared in " The Lost Poetry of William Hope Hodgson " . A number of other Hodgson works are reprinted for the first time since their original publication in the five - volume " Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson " series published by Night Shade Books . Copyright protection has now expired on most of Hodgson ' s work , with the exception of some of the works published posthumously , including many of his poems . Novels . Order of writing versus order of publication . Sam Gafford , in his essay " Writing Backwards : The Novels of William Hope Hodgson " has suggested that Hodgson ' s four major novels may have been published in roughly the reverse order of their writing . If this is true , then " The Night Land " was Hodgson ' s first novel , in which he poured out his imagination at its most unbridled , and not his last . Gafford writes : This concern over the order of composition of the novels may seem of little importance until we consider the implications toward Hodgson ' s work overall . . . in effect , Hodgson moved away from " TNL " ’ s quasi - science fiction scenario ( which contained an astounding number of original conceptions ) and toward " BoGC " ’ s more basic adventure slant . If we accept Gafford ' s thesis , then Hodgson actually wrote " The Boats of the " Glen Carrig " " last , and it benefits from the modernization of style to the point where it is Hodgson ' s most accessible novel : When he finishes the group with " BoGC " , Hodgson has managed to rid himself of these affectations of style and produces a book written in a flat but serviceable tone . With each book , Hodgson learns better control of language and more writing savvy and eventually begins to develop his own voice . But despite the excessively archaic prose style , which does make them less approachable , it is actually Hodgson ' s earlier works that are considered masterpieces today . And as Gafford says : . . . we can only wonder what wonderfully imaginative excesses like " The Night Land " may have been lost because of an unappreciative public . Short stories . Miscellaneous stories . " Note " : the following list of stories is based on the 5 - volume " Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson " published by Night Shade Books to be completed in late 2006 .