The Ghost Pirates by William Hope Hodgson (1909): William Hope Hodgson's brilliant short novel of the sea and its terrors is a fine, tightly plotted work of horror and disquieting weirdness. A careful, fairly slow build of suspense climaxes in a rapid-fire and horrifying climax.
Hodgson's early days as a merchant sailor come into full play in this tale of the cargo ship Mortzestus, plying the seas some time early in the 20th century or late in the 19th. The Mortzestus is a sailing ship on an Atlantic run. But she's also a ship whose crews have felt her to be more and more strange as the years have passed. And strange she is, and becoming moreso.
The joys of The Ghost Pirates lie in a lot of areas, from the unusual but intelligibly delivered dialects of the sailors (and of this particular sailing milieu itself, really) to the gradual but accelerating accumulation of details and events that give the novel its name.
From the beginning, we know something has happened -- the narrative is framed as being the written testimony of Jessop, last survivor of the Mortzestus. Jessop has been rescued by another ship. Rescued from what? Well, that's why there's a novel.
The Ghost Pirates is one of two Hodgson weird novels of the sea (The Boats of the Glen Carrig is the other). Hodgson also wrote dozens of other stories set at sea, from comic pieces to thrillers to horror and the supernatural. He also wrote in a sub-genre I'd probably call 'Fictional Sea Cryptids,' tales of unusual animals and other... things... which come into conflict with human beings.
The Ghost Pirates is part ghost story, part cryptid fiction, part pseudo-scientific horror story. Perhaps. Jessop offers an explanation for the events of the novel that's not a tale of actual ghosts, but he doesn't necessarily know what really caused the events of the novel.
Nonetheless, Jessop's quasi-scientific explanation of the horrors he and the rest of the crew of the Mortzestus are beset by is in line with many of Hodgson's other stories and novels in which supernatural events are given disturbing, visionary, cosmic explanations. A model of narrative economy, The Ghost Pirates is one of the treasures of weird fiction. Highly recommended.
The House by Bentley Little (1999): A straightforward, meat-and-potatoes horror writer stylistically, Little tends to be innovative in terms of his subject matter and his approach to it. Magic and the supernatural can be jarringly weird in his novels, even as they also inspire more normative thrills and chills.
I don't know if Little has taken the conversation about what real absolute evil would look like in Arthur Machen's pivotal century-old story "The White People" as his model (real absolute evil would be a complete violation or inversion of accepted natural law: roses singing, or stones walking, for example), but the effect is sometimes the same. Though there's lot of more normal supernatural and natural horrors in The House as well.
We begin with four bizarre, seemingly supernatural and seemingly fatal occurences. Then we meet five seemingly disparate people from across the United States who turn out to have very similar memories of their weird and scary childhood homes, even though none of them lived in the same house. For the most part, they've repressed those childhood memories, and never gone home again. But now they have to go home again. Supernatural events have started to occur across America, and those childhood experiences somehow explain why.
Little is a dab hand at sympathetic characterization, even with characters who turn out to be increasingly unsympathetic as a novel progresses. It's that characterization that holds the novel together through its oddities and idiosyncrasies. The absolute weirdness of many of the supernatural events goes too far for scares at times (a rose in a block of cheese being the least scarifying of these things), a problem shared with another Little novel, The Return. But there are also many effectively horrifying bits, along with an adversary who really does make one squeamish whenever it appears.
Little's skill at plotting is also at work throughout -- the narrative rockets along, and while one may be underwhelmed by certain inventions, one won't stop reading. There's no poetry here, just muscular prose and invention that sometimes gets a bit out of control.
Little's tendency to two word titles can make it difficult to remember what novel is what -- this plain-style stuff can go too far, though calling a collection of short stories The Collection is pretty funny, given the number of The [Something] novels that preceded the publication of The Collection. Oh, well. Recommended.
