Creature! by Bill Pronzini (ed.)

Author:Bill Pronzini (ed.) [Pronzini, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy and Monsters
Publisher: Arbor House
Published: 1981-04-18T23:00:00+00:00

A TROPICAL HORROR

BY

WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON

Mariners have told tales for centuries of terrible creatures inhabiting the waters of the seven seas. Seventeenth and eighteenth century marine maps are festooned with sea serpents of every type and description, especially to signify ”danger areas” theretofore unexplored. As Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner says, ‘Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs/Upon the slimy sea …”

The story that follows is an account of one ship3s meeting with a monster of the deep, a “hideous creature [that] lies heaped in writhing, slimy coils,” with “a vast slobbering mouth a fathom across.” And a fearful account it is, told in graphic detail—a tale of pure riveting horror that is definitely not for the squeamish; what this creature does to the men of the barque Glen Doon, homeward bound from Melbourne to London, is the terror of a thousand nightmares …

William Hope Hodgson (1875-1918) was one of the finest craftsmen of the turn-of-the-century horror story. In his too-brief career he published several novels and dozens of poems and short stories (“A Tropical Horror” is one of the least known and most effective of these), a large percentage involve the sea, where he had spent eight of his early years. His first novel was The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ (1907); a year later, his most acclaimed book, The House on the Borderland, appeared. Other works of note are The Ghost Pirates, The Night Land, and Carnacki, The Ghost Finder—the last-named a collection of superior stories about an investigator of psychic phenomena. Hodgson’s life and contribution to the literature of the macabre were cut short by an exploding mortar shell in the waning days of World War I.

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