Boats of the Glen Carrig and Other Nautical Adventures

From Publishers WeeklyThe Boats of the "Glen Carrig" and Other Nautical Adventures: Being the First Volume of the Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson, edited by Jeremy Lassen, collects all the series sea fiction of this British fantasist, much of it long unavailable. As the 23 short stories show, Hodgson (1877-1918), best known for his novels of cosmic vision, could write quite successfully for the commercial magazine market of his day. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. From BooklistVolume one of the Hodgson's collected fiction starts the project well, for it contains much of his best work. Hodgson was a professional merchant mariner for much of his life until his death in World War I, and his career began during the last days of seafaring under sail and without radio. His mostreprinted work is the novella The Boats of the "Glen Carrig", a compelling compounding of survival at sea and the supernatural. In his Sargasso Sea stories, corralled in the book's second section, Hodgson takes the legendary endless mass of weeds in the North Atlantic, which imprisoned ships eternally, as the pretext for six Lovecraftian-before-Lovecraft, undeniably effective tales. The 13 adventures of Captain Gault and the two of Captain Jat are more classic pulp-mystery thrillers; they reflect the era when a captain was "master under God" in fact and in law, and also Anglo-German tensions before World War I. For historically minded genre fans, especially if they savor some sea salt in their fantasy. Roland GreenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved