{horror} – Page 128 – { feuilleton }

The Horse of the Invisible

Can Carnacki make any claim to be taken seriously as a detective? If he solves anything it is by force of will, rather than the application of deductive powers. He is no Sherlockian ironist, no high-domed mental traveller. He stands as close to Holmes as Mike Hammer does to Philip Marlowe. His methods are enthusiastic but basic: good old-fashioned head-in-the-door stuff. He is not so much a “ghostbuster” as a self-starting lightning rod for psychic phenomena that has not yet been housebroken.

Thus Iain Sinclair in a typically acerbic afterword to the 1991 Grafton paperback of Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson. Holmes would indeed look askance at Carnacki’s methods but that didn’t prevent the occult investigator being drafted as one of The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes in the first television series of that name in 1971. I was reminded of this dramatisation following last week’s discussion of Hodgsonian cinema; I’ve known about the episode for years—notable for having Donald Pleasence in the role of Thomas Carnacki—but hadn’t watched it until this week courtesy of YouTube.

Philip Mackie wrote the script for The Horse of the Invisible, and Alan Cooke was the director. Their adaptation is interesting mostly for seeing a Hodgson story dramatised; as a piece of television the presentation is serious and well-acted but looks rather creaky today, suffering from the over-lit artificiality that always blighted studio-shot productions attempting to create any kind of atmosphere. Donald Pleasence is his typical lugubrious self which doesn’t really suit Carnacki’s bull-headed enthusiasm but I don’t mind that, Pleasence was a good actor so it’s a treat to see him play the part. And we do get to see Carnacki’s “electric pentacle” in action (Carnacki enjoys his Edwardian gadgets) in the midst of which the beleaguered Michele Dotrice is forced to spend the night. The most successful Carnacki stories are those that play to Hodgson’s strengths as a writer of supernatural dread, stories such as The Gateway of the Monster or The Hog. The Horse of the Invisible doesn’t attain the heights of those tales but then it would be a doomed venture trying to conjure Hodgson’s cosmic horrors on a limited budget. With this story you get a taste of the supernatural, which no doubt sets it apart from the other “Rivals”, whilst staying within the bounds of credibility.

There’s one curious detail worth mentioning: in both the story and the dramatisation the character of the fiancé is named “Charles Beaumont”. There was a real Charles Beaumont, a screenwriter responsible for many scripts for The Twilight Zone TV series, as well as for some of the superior American horror films of the 1960s, including Night of the Eagle, The Haunted Palace (Roger Corman’s adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward) and The Masque of the Red Death. In last week’s discussion I mentioned John Carpenter’s The Fog as a good example of Hodgsonian cinema on account of its ghost pirates. My memory may be playing tricks but I’m sure that Carpenter has a reference to a “Charlie Beaumont” in either The Fog or Halloween, both films being littered with significant character names. (There’s a “Mr Machen” in The Fog). Donald Pleasence was in Halloween, of course, playing a doctor with a name lifted from Psycho. I’ve searched in vain for the Beaumont reference; does this ring a bell for any Carpenter-philes?

Both series of The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes are available from Network DVD.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tentacles #2: The Lost Continent
• Tentacles #1: The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’
• Hodgson versus Houdini
• Weekend links: Hodgson edition
• “The game is afoot!”
• Druillet meets Hodgson

Hanging in Lovecrafton

Lovecrafton.

I’ve had online art exhibitions in the past but this month some of my work can be seen inside a virtual space. Lovecrafton is a Lovecraft-themed town in Second Life created by illustrator John Aardema. As is evident from the screenshots, the atmosphere is suitably autumnal with the requisite Colonial architecture. I was slightly surprised by these views, almost everything I’d seen of Second Life in the past looked overlit and underdeveloped, giving the impression of a crude computer game.

Carter Family Homestead.

I’ve not visited Lovecrafton but if you have a Second Life account you can access it via this link. Lovecraft-derived artwork by several artists will be displayed in the art gallery there throughout October, all of it annotated and linked to the websites of each artist.

The art gallery.

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Tentacles #4: Cthulhu in Poland

Several months ago Polish publisher Vesper asked to use some of my Lovecraft art for a Polish collection of the author’s work. Their weighty paperback just happened to arrive during this tentacle-themed week, an event which also gives me an opportunity to mention again (how could I not?) that two of these pieces can be found in the new Cthulhu Calendar. An ideal Halloween gift! Breaks the ice at eldritch parties! Etc. By coincidence I also received a book this week about vampire squid but I’ll say more about that after I’ve had a chance to read it.

Despite Cthulhu being on the cover, the title of the book is (according to Google) The Dunwich Horror and Other Scary Stories which is no doubt a better sell with “horror” being up front. There are only fifteen stories but the page count runs to 792 since most of them are the later, longer works, including the entirety of At the Mountains of Madness and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. A number of my illustrations are used within, one of which—the drawing of Advocates’ Close in Edinburgh which first appeared in The Haunter of the Dark—gets repurposed as an illustration for The Music of Erich Zann (above). Quite a fitting use, I think.

In addition you also get my widescreen view of R’lyeh as a spread on the inside of the French flaps. And my copy came with a nice R’lyeh bookmark. Those interested can order the book here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Tentacles #2: The Lost Continent

If William Hope Hodgson’s The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ represents the Sublime of tentacular sea fiction then The Lost Continent, a 1968 Hammer film based on Dennis Wheatley’s 1938 novel Uncharted Seas, is the correspondingly Ridiculous end of the subgenre. The Lost Continent is an irritating film for Hodgson enthusiasts since it’s still the most Hodgsonian film out there, at least where the Sargasso side of things is concerned.

Illustration by SR Boldero (1960).

Despite its Wheatley origins the similarities to Hodgson’s sea stories are no coincidence: Wheatley chose two Hodgson titles—Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder and The Ghost Pirates—for the Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult series that Sphere Books published in the 1970s. In the introductions Wheatley notes that Hodgson was a favourite writer whose work he discovered in the 1920s; he also mentions having collected a set of Hodgson first editions. Wheatley could have justifiably claimed that the “Weed-World” as a location wasn’t unique to Hodgson but Uncharted Seas also features the giant crabs, marauding octopuses and besieged castaways familiar from The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ and the short stories.

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Tentacles #1: The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’

Famous Fantastic Mysteries, June 1945. Illustration by Lawrence (Sterne Stevens).

Following last week’s revelation of Lovecraftian horror, I thought it might be worth demonstrating just how much the tentacle-menacing-a-ship scenario is owned by William Hope Hodgson. The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ (1907) is one of Hodgson’s lesser novels, overshadowed by the cosmic horrors of The House on the Borderland and The Night Land, but it’s a memorable work all the same. The narrative fits into his cycle of Sargasso Sea stories: a small band of 18th-century sailors, survivors of the wreck of the ‘Glen Carrig’, drift across the Atlantic into the weed-strewn “cemetery of the oceans” where they have to fight off giant octopuses and the predations of “weed men”, humanoid creatures with tentacular hands. As will be seen below, it’s the attack on a wrecked ship trapped in the weed that many of the illustrators have chosen to focus on.

Illustration by Lawson Wood (1911).

This was something I hadn’t seen before: an illustration for a story with a scenario very similar to ‘Glen Carrig’ where the sailors journey under canvas in their lifeboats. Another tale of the sinister Sargasso:

This is the fifth message that I have sent abroad over the loathsome surface of this vast Weed-World, praying that it may come to the open sea ere the lifting power of my fire-balloon be gone, and yet, if it come there, how shall I be the better for it? Yet write I must, or go mad, and so I choose to write, though feeling as I write that no living creature, save it be some giant octopus that lives in the weed about me, will ever see the thing I write. (more)

Les Canots du “Glen Carrig” / La Maison au bord du monde / Les pirates fantômes (1971). Illustration by Philippe Druillet.

A French Hodgson collection, the octopoid cover of which can be seen here. These were the endpapers; the rest of Druillet’s illustrations can be seen here.

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