Though I originally published this last year, I figured it fits with the holiday season, so I updated it a bit and republished it. A new article on the progenitor of the bodypart split for bodybuilders should drop before election day, and I’ll keep updating the 31 Days article on a semi-daily basis in the meantime. We’ve also got two test episodes of Dead Weight recorded and being edited, and are working on our first fully scripted episode for the beginning of November. Till then, here’s Hodgson, the bodybuilding war hero who influenced HP Lovecraft.
In my efforts to get into post-grad programs in the late 90’s and early oughts, I utilized three literary sources to bring my vocabulary up from 95% to 99% on all of my graduate entrance exams- Jules Verne, HG Wells, and the inimitable HP Lovecraft. Of the three, Lovecraft was likely the most entertaining and certainly the most erudite, although his general weakness of character and ultra-shittiness as a human being made it occasionally difficult for me to enjoy all of his writing. And before you get all up in arms that I’ve become some social justice warrior because I found this lightweight Nazi’s bizarre white supremacy to be irksome, consider the fact that this “supremacist” was a fearful, sickly shut-in of a Mark Zuckerberg look-alike, which is hardly “supreme” anything but lame. And while Lovecraft’s eldritch, multidimensional, cosmic horror was awesome in its use of antiquarian vocabulary and unique brand of antediluvian monsters, it was not the only game on the block as a lot of us (myself included) have thought forever- in fact, the subject of this article was a heavy influence on Lovecraft himself.
Was he the worst person in the world? Certainly not- he wrote some badass fiction and gave weeaboo broads everywhere all that much more reason to rub one out to tentacle rape hentai in a bizarre effort to get away from actual gangbang porn. Though absolutely none of the foregoing sentence makes the least fucking sense to me given that there is plenty of awesome hardcore, violent, cum-drenched bondage gangbang porn out there to satisfy even the most suicidally cock hungry masochist broads, there is another author who deserves mad cosmic horror props. Meet William Hope Hodgson, a hardcore, badass, bodybuilding motherfucking war hero writer of weird fiction.
“I read, and in reading, lifted the Curtains of the Impossible that blind the mind, and looked out into the unknown.”
Like Lovecraft, Hodgson wrote the type of weirder-than-a-Gary-Busey-wet-dream shit that makes you wonder if they’d landed their hands on the world’s earliest batch of LSD, but unlike Lovecraft, he was cool as fuck. Born in 1877, Hodgson predated Lovecraft by 13 years. By the time Lovecraft was eight, Hodgson had opened his first gym, and began writing articles about strength training and nutrition to promote it. In an amusing twist from the modern day, there was no money in writing about strength training and nutrition at the time, though there was in fiction, so Hodgson switched to writing that in an effort to pay the bills. What resulted was less prolific than Lovecraft’s horror fiction, but every bit as cool. Cooler, even, when you look at the man’s more-adventurous-than-Teddy-Roosevelt’s-Sasquatch-hunt-style life.
William “Hope” Hodson Vital Statistics
Born: 1877
Died: 1918 (war)
Height: 5’4.5″
Weight: 150lbs
Chest: 42.5″
Biceps: 15″
Neck: 16.5″
Forearm: 12.5″
Waist: 28.5″
Thigh: 22″
Calf: 14.5″
Best Lifts: 112lb one arm press (holding two 56lb dumbbells in one hand); 500+ partial deadlift
Notable Literary Works: The House on the Borderland (1908), The Night Land (1912), and the short story adventures of “detective of the occult” Thomas Carnacki
Artists Influenced: Guillermo Del Toro, HP Lovecraft, Terry Pratchett, Andre Norton, Greg Bear
Has Characters In: the Lovecraft and Sherlock Holmes universes
Hodgson, who was known as “Hope” to his friends, was the second child out of a full dozen children born to an epic dickhead of a British clergyman. Born in 1877, Hope was shuttled all over the place with his intractable parents, as they moved almost yearly during the first 13 years of his life. By 1890, however, they settled in/were banished to the dreary ass village of Adrahan in Country Galway, which gets over 200 days of rain a year. That dismal shithole did serve a purpose, however, as it served as his inspiration for his badass pig-monster-filled nightmarescape in House on the Borderlands. After running away a few times to escape the oppressive household of a religious nut and the bleak, foggy landscape of that Irish backwater, Hope’s uncle enlisted him in a four year stint in the Merchant Navy, where he became a cabin boy, although with far fewer cheeky shenanigans than Chris Elliot and far more beatings and rape.
While in the Merchant Navy, Hope developed a profound hatred for the organization itself, but a love for the sea. His experience there, which included as much bullying as drunken sailors could heap on a young teen, served as the inspiration for almost all of his fiction, as well as instilling in him a fierce desire to get jacked so he could fight off whatever drunken, snaggle-toothed rapist might want a fresh piece of teen ass that night. He began lifting dumbbells and hitting a heavy bag daily, then fucking up the older seamen nightly.
And in direct contravention of the posters on Sherdog, who incessantly assert that being strong doesn’t make you a good fighter, it proved to be a good fucking start for Hodgson. After a couple of years of living an Avengement-style existence and lifting weights incessantly, Hodgson was the lightweight terror of the Merchant Navy, so much so that he was recognized by his commanding officers as being one of the best all-round fighters in his regiment. And the experience served Hodgson doubly, because in addition to instilling him with a love of lifting and a knack for brawling, those drunken seamen and their semen became the inspiration for the shit-heel sailors in just about every piece of fiction Hope wrote.
After saving a fellow sailor in shark-infested waters in 1898 (and pulling in the Royal Humane Society’s medal for doing so), Hope had had enough of the ocean and was ready to dry the fuck out and get his swole on. He quit the Merchant Navy in 1899, and opened a school for Physical Culture in Lancashire, home of catch-as-catch-can wrestling the same year. From 1899 to 1903, Hope wrote about training and diet while promoting his style of training, which was uniformly good for fucking up sailors and, weirdly, for curing indigestion. While there, he trained the members of the Blackburn police force, who were likely some hard motherfuckers for having to death with the rough-and-tumble brawling coal miners of the region.
“I am what I might term an unprejudiced skeptic. I am not given to either believing or disbelieving things ‘on principle,’ as I have found many idiots prone to be, and what is more, some of them not ashamed to boast of the insane fact.”
Of Note: This seemed to be a trend at the time. A contemporary of Hodgson was EW Barton Wright, who founded a school of Bartitsu, his style of “gentlemanly self-defense” in London almost at exactly the same time as Hope founded his school. Like Hodgson, Barton-Wright found it almost impossible to make a living at training people in fighting and lifting, and had it not been for the fact that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes use the style in his books, we might have forgotten about Barton-Wright and his methods altogether… which would leave Steampunk nerds entirely defenseless, rather than just almost entirely.
Bartitsu, for anyone who cares, is one of the first Western hybrid martial arts, incorporating elements of savate, jujutsu, Swiss stick fighting, and British boxing. Finding that wholly unprofitable, Barton-Wright focused more on physical therapy later in life and was one of the first people to utilize breathing exercises and electrotherapy.
In what appears to have been a case of “no publicity is bad publicity,” Hope managed to piss off half the free world by fucking with the nearly-beatified, badass muscular occult skeptic and all-around weirdo Harry Houdini. In 1902, Hope jumped onstage with Houdini and a bunch of bondage gear he borrowed from the Blackburn police department and restrainted Houdini with them. The escape artist had previously escaped the Blackburn jail, so I suppose this was a little payback for his training clients, or he simply felt an affinity for the porcine evildoers in his book and decided to help those in our world. In any event, Houdini had a hell of a time removing the restraints due to Hope’s knowledge of human musculature and his own physical strength, and later claimed Hodgson had intentionally jammed the locks on the handcuffs and purposefully injured him.
Hodgson’s work on training was nothing anyone would want to read, but if you’ve read the shit written by Sandow at the same time, it’s utterly useless as well. Whereas he should have been writing articles like “How to punch a hole through the chest of a drunken sea hobo,” he wrote shit like “Health from Scientific Exercise,” which included trite bullshit like “Of all good things, good health is the best.” He did make an interesting distinction between sport, which he called “recreative exercise” and “scientific exercise,” however. Rather than promoting the latter to the exclusion of the former, which is all in vogue these days with the “science based” pussies and their phantamsagoric belief in the utility of their bullshit training systems, he noted that calisthenics and weight training are essentially exercise designed for city life.
“It may well here touch on the difference between “recreative” exercise (such as cricket, football, hockey, etc.) and “scientific” exercise, which is really exercise systematised. In the one it is necessary to go out of doors, have daylight, and spend a considerable amount of time, all of which are not convenient to those living in big cities, where the space of ground required for these games is alone sufficient to prevent them from becoming generally useful. It is here that “scientific” exercise steps in. “Scientific” exercise may be practised in one’s bedroom; it does not take up much time; it may be followed either at night or in the morning; according to convenience; and lastly, the amount indulged in can be regulated to a nicety, so that even the weakness may take it up in safety” (Hodson Scientific).
In the end, it amounted to nothing but stretching, leg raises, and pushups, but you can see the origin in his training beginnings- he translated his training methods aboard rat-filled barges steeped in whiskey into shit that people could do in the city to stay fit. As I mentioned in the Empire Builder series, city life at the turn of the city was smog-choked, hot, filthy, cramped, miserable dogshit. I truly believe if he’d sold it as a method for fighting off hard-bitten salty dogs when they’re drunkenly trying to get inside you at midnight, it might have grown legs and taken off- to me, that’s a far more compelling angle. I would venture to guess that’s how he sold it to the Blackburn police, because the above pansy shit was not going to get an ornery bunch of drunken bobbies used to brawling with coal miners in mind to do anything but perhaps rape him.
His gym, however, was no joke. Although Hodgson was situated in Blackburn, which is a relative backwater in England, his gym impressed the shit out of everyone who entered it. The local newspaper of the time mentioned that
“Mr. W. H. Hodgson’s School of Physical Culture is now one of the most familiar institutions in Blackburn, and although it has been in existence only a matter of eighteen months, neither the school, nor its Principal, needs any introduction to our readers. Observing that Mr. Hodgson had reopened his classes for the winter season, a representative of the “Weekly Telegraph” looked in at the school in Ainsworth Street this week, and Mr Hodgson readily expressed his willingness to “report progress”. First of all he invited me to see his rooms, of which he is pardonably proud, for there is certainly not a better equipped establishment of its kind outside the great cities in the country. The accommodation is almost extravagant—a large roomy theatre for exercises and drills, comfortable and cosy dressing and other ante-rooms, with shower baths, &c, the whole covering an area of 1,200 square feet, and being admirably ventilated and lighted by electricity. In regard to fittings and apparatus, there is absolutely nothing wanting” (Gafford).
When his gym went tits up, Hodgson went in a direction no modern person could emulate- he started writing fiction. When any person with a camera and a mouth can seemingly make money off lifting (save for myself, amusingly) and it is nearly impossible to make a living off fiction in the internet era, it seems fucking ridiculous that is an idea that would even float across his consciousness. In any event, it was a tough row to hoe, and Hodgson scraped by on odd jobs for a couple of years until his first story was published in 1906, entitled “The Goddess of Death.”
A yeah later, Hope dropped his first published novel, The Boats of the “Glen Carrig’, then hit the world with his epic cosmic horror The House on the Borderland in 1908, The former established Hodgson’s version of the Cthulu mythos- the Sargasso Sea. Though the Sargasso Sea is an actual place, Hodgson’s Sargasso sea is a seaweed-choked swamp teeming with vicious monsters, which was used by later authors both on Earth and in space. Hodgson’s Sargasso Sea is a positively Gothic nightmarescape of an aquatic setting- shipwrecks form a sort of reef ghost town beset on all sides by giant crabs and kraken- it was essentially as if Jules Verne’s 1000 Leagues Under the Sea had been rewritten by HP Lovecraft, and The Boats of the “Glen Carrig‘ ends up being a hell of a lot more like The Descent than a happy-go-lucky sea adventure.
Likewise, readers probably weren’t ready for the weird brutality of The House on the Borderland at a time when Dracula was the scariest novel written to that point, and Hodgson’s villians weren’t effete, limp-wristed Eurotrash gently nibbling on broads necks… they were much fiercer than anything anyone had yet conceived.
“‘A pig, by Jove!’ I said, and rose to my feet. Thus, I saw the thing more completely; but it was no pig—God alone knows what it was. It reminded me, vaguely, of the hideous Thing that had haunted the great arena. It had a grotesquely human mouth and jaw; but with no chin of which to speak. The nose was prolonged into a snout; thus it was that with the little eyes and queer ears, gave it such an extraordinarily swinelike appearance. Of forehead there was little, and the whole face was of an unwholesome white color.
For perhaps a minute, I stood looking at the thing with an ever growing feeling of disgust, and some fear. The mouth kept jabbering, inanely, and once emitted a half-swinish grunt. I think it was the eyes that attracted me the most; they seemed to glow, at times, with a horribly human intelligence, and kept flickering away from my face, over the details of the room, as though my stare disturbed it.
It appeared to be supporting itself by two clawlike hands upon the windowsill. These claws, unlike the face, were of a clayey brown hue, and bore an indistinct resemblance to human hands, in that they had four fingers and a thumb; though these were webbed up to the first joint, much as are a duck’s. Nails it had also, but so long and powerful that they were more like the talons of an eagle than aught else.
As I have said, before, I felt some fear; though almost of an impersonal kind. I may explain my feeling better by saying that it was more a sensation of abhorrence; such as one might expect to feel, if brought in contact with something superhumanly foul; something unholy—belonging to some hitherto undreamt of state of existence.”
Writing almost as prolifically as I do, Hodgson churned out prose as furiously as most people masturbate. He dropped The Ghost Pirates in 1909 and his magnum opus, The Night Land, in 1912. I’m not certain that The Ghost Pirates was the first novel of that trope, but if it was, it’s influence extends to modern day films like Blackbeard’s Ghost and those godawful Pirates of the Caribbean flicks. Interspersed between his novels, Hope churned out short stories with a fucking vengeance, penning around 100 of them. Ranging as widely in genre as a person could, Hope seemingly wrote everything but erotica, even fitting some romance between his sci fi, horror, fantasy, and mysteries.
His great contributions to the general world of tropes beyond the Sargasso Sea was that of Carnacki, an occult investigator. Carnacki’s influence can be seen in everything from Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden character and DC’s John Constantine. Hope wrote nine stories about Carnacki and unlike those of his contemporary Sherlock Holmes, Carnacki’s tales were steeped in the supernatural. In addition to using scientific methods for resolving the case, Carnacki utilized traditional folklore and a badass steampunk combination of the two, in the form of the Electric Pentacle and his Spectrum Defense.
“I came across Professor Garder’s ‘Experiments with a Medium.’ When they surrounded the Medium with a current, in vacuum, he lost his power—almost as if it cut him off from the Immaterial. That made me think a lot; and that is how I came to make the Electric Pentacle, which is a most marvelous ‘Defense’ against certain manifestations. I used the shape of the defensive star for this protection, because I have, personally, no doubt at all but that there is some extraordinary virtue in the old magic figure. Curious thing for a Twentieth Century man to admit, is it not? But, then, as you all know, I never did, and never will, allow myself to be blinded by the little cheap laughter. I ask questions, and keep my eyes open. In this last case I had little doubt that I had run up against a supernatural monster, and I meant to take every possible care; for the danger is abominable. I turned-to now to fit the Electric Pentacle, setting it so that each of its ‘points’ and ‘vales’ coincided exactly with the ‘points’ and ‘vales’ of the drawn pentagram upon the floor. Then I connected up the battery, and the next instant the pale blue glare from the intertwining vacuum tubes shone out…. [The Pentacle] must be made afresh and around the one to be protected… for neither ‘yarbs nor fyre nor water’ must be used a second time….”
Carnacki’s legacy has endured, though surprisingly less than it might have given his uniqueness. He is a member of the 20th Century League of Extraordinary Gentleman, was the subject of an episode of the BBC’s series Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, wherein he was played by the Dr. Loomis himself, Donald Pleasance. Additionally, Carnacki’s carried on in books since Hodgson’s death and has been absorbed as a central character in the Sherlock Holmes universe and the Cthulu mythos.
As sick as that literary legacy is, Hodgson’s greatest triumph has to be his insane horror novel The Night Land, which he chopped down from its original Stephen King-worthy length to a chapbook version in The Dream of X. The world of The Night Land was actually set up in The House on the Borderlands, in which the narrator travels into the distant future wherein humanity has died, and then further to where the Earth itself has died. The setting of The Night Land is in the Last Redoubt, a giant metal pyramid in which the last vestiges of humanity lives as the Earth dies after the death of the sun (and also the progenitor of the idea of the arcology, which will be familiar to people who played older versions of Sim City).
Though he didn’t invent the genre of the Dying Earth, Hodgson definitely propelled it forward by leaps and bounds. Likely inspired by Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and the terrifying advent of chemical weapons on the eve of World War One, Hope’s book was beyond fucking bleak. The Earth is nearly dead, and everything outside of the Last Redoubt is shrouded in darkness, where horrendous monsters lurk, ready to tear anything apart they happen to find. Clearly, you see the heavy influence of this book on Pitch Black right at the outset, and in that Riddick-style universe the protagonist receives a telepathic message from a woman claiming to be his wife in another, semi-mythical Redoubt.
The book is a rescue mission, in which the unnamed protagonist leaves his massive home, in which each of the over 1320 floors is its own stand-alone world, dons armor and arms himself to brave the lurking horrors of the outside world. Frankly, this would make a dope movie starring Chris Hemsworth, since the book includes training montages and a decent amount of romance in addition to the horror elements, this book would be the first hard-R romantic sci fi-horror flick of all time. Tragically, we’ll likely never see a major studio make that kind of reach across genres, especially since the investment in effects would be pretty considerable, because the world in The Night Lands is fucking insane:
- there are subhumans and ab-humans roaming the Earth in search of food and water, preying on each other and a species of weird hunchbacks also crawling the Earth.
- constant vulcanism provides the only light, but the Earth is constantly racked with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
- giant grey men prowl the borderlands, slaughtering and eating everything/everyone they find.
- the Others, which are alien species allowed to live on Earth when humanity was experimenting with inter-dimensional and time travel to find a way around the death of the Sun, are lurking around and present a constant threat.
- something called the Watchers also roams the shattered landscape. They’re a non-human species that evolved as the Earth died. They are mostly spectators in the story, but occasionally prey on humans as well.
- the ruins of mobile cities which very well might have inspired the cities in Mortal Engines dot the landscape.
Tragically but unsurprisingly, Hodgson’s genius was the kind that was only going to be recognized after his death. He made little money on his works, and moved to France in 1913 to save a little money after getting married. That move was short-lived, however, as England declared war on Germany in 1914 and the couple returned to England so Hope could join the Officer Training Corps of the University of London.
Due to his previous experience in the Merchant Navy, Hope was perfect for the Royal Navy, and they tried desperately to recruit him. As he’d had his fill of sea hobos, oceans, boats, and all other things nautical, Hope told them to go fuck themselves and wrangled a commission as a Lieutenant in the 171st Battery of the Royal Field Artillery. As he had his sea legs but was apparently shit with horses, Hodgson was pretty much immediately thrown from his horse while training new soldiers. Because he suffered a serious concussion and badly broke his jaw, Hodgson was discharged with full honors and returned home, but Hope wasn’t about to take that shit- he’d brawled enough drunken sea hobos in his day that a broken jaw was just another Tuesday to him. Idiotically determined to join the fray in what was perhaps the most ridiculously pointless waste of human life since the American Civil War, Hodgson re-enlisted in October 1917 and was assigned to the 11th Brigade, 84th Battery in Ypres.
If you’re unfamiliar with the events of WW1, imagine a world in which thousands of severely mentally retarded people were allowed to line ditches with steel helmets, and those goofs then spent years continuously banging on their helmets, then luring them into a false sense of security before lobbing grenades into their midst. The retarded people had been warned their tactics would not work, had seen them not work a decade earlier in Russian, and still persisted in using them because… they were retarded, clearly. Periodically, dudes would get fed up and try to sprint from one ditch to the other only to get moved down by an unseen gunner like grass cut down by a lawnmower, because even Usain Bolt’s speedy ass can’t outrun a bullet. And then to ramp up the insanity, they added in the liberal use of poison gasses that melted your skin and lungs and were an ever-present threat for which both opposing sides were usually incompletely prepared to combat. That is the superfantastic funtime of which Hope just couldn’t wait to be a part.
Hope got his wish, though they never recovered any of his participating parts, as he continuously volunteered for the most dangerous duties and was atomized by German shells while on his last suicide mission. I can only assume that he was dead fucking sick of being ignored in the literary world and was so hell-bent on making a name for himself that he was willing to risk astronomical odds in the effort. That, or he just hated the everloving fuck out of married life, which is hard to imagine because of the ridiculously sappy romance shit that he wrote, but he might have gambled on a broad he thought was Charlize Theron and came up Tara Reid instead. Or he could be like modern servicemen and just really wanted to kill scores of brown people for no reason without going to prison for it- we will never know what his motivations were, because in spite of his prolific fiction work, he never detailed his insane desire to catch lead in France.
Hodgson’s commanding officer wrote the following to his widow:
“I cannot express my deep sympathy for you in your great bereavement. I feel it most terribly myself, and so do all the other officers and men of the battery. He was the life and soul of the mess—always so willing and cherry. Of his courage I can give no praise that is high enough. He was always volunteering for any dangerous duty, and it was owing to his entire lack of fear that he probably met his death on April 17. He had performed wonders of gallantry only a few days before, and it is a miracle that he survived that day. I myself am deeply grieved, having lost a real, true friend and a splendid officer.”
TLDR: We wasted that brave-beyond-the-point-of-recklessness motherfucker’s life in the dumbest way possible. Of that, I can assure you.
Though his death was stupid, pointless, and regrettable, the rest of his life was fucking awesome. Hodgson influenced badass director Guillermo Del Toro, who stated in an interview that his favorite authors were Bradbury, Clarke Ashton Smith, and William Hope Hodgson; HP Lovecraft, who wrote an entire essay on his love for Hodgson’s work; Terry Pratchett; and directly inspired Andre Norton’s Sargasso of Space.
Though you might not recognize her name (I didn’t), Norton was the first woman to win the Gandalf Grand Master Award, a lifetime achievement award from Worldcon, the longest running science fiction convention in the world (it’s been continuously geeking harder than a furry in a Build-A-Bear Workshop since 1939). The award was only given out to a few people, among whom were L. Sprague de Camp (who coined the term ET, wrote some really awesome man-out-of-time alternative histories, and is one of my all-time favorite authors); Tolkien (blech, but you people love him); Fritz Leiber (another name with which you might be unfamiliar, but he invented the urban horror and sword and sandals genres); and the inimitable Ursula K. LeGuin, queen of libertarian science fiction and all around awesome chick. Thus, winning that thing essentially means you’re a fucking god in fantasy and sci fi, so recognize- Hodgson was a fucking literary god.
His books also heavily influenced the works of Greg Bear, who actually put Hope into one of his novels in addition to specifically referencing events in The House on the Borderlands and The Night Land. His works also spawned two short story collections of stories set in the combined universe of House on the Borderlands and The Night Land, and I’m sure he’s influence plenty of other people in the last 100 years, though I don’t have the time or inclination to compile an exhaustive list of them. Sufficed to say, the man left his fucking mark on the world.
So when you’re getting hammered this Halloween or Samhain or whatever you happen to be celebrating this Thursday, call a round for Hodgson and throw him a toast- everyone should know about this bad motherfucker, and sadly they don’t. Without dudes like this reckless, fistfighting, sea-hating weirdo, we’d not have the awesome world of horror fiction and film in which we live today, and would thus be living in a world bleaker than that which he and Lovecraft envisioned.
Sources:
Electric Pentacle. YSDC Cthulu Wiki. Web. 29 Oct 2019. http://www.yog-sothoth.com/wiki/index.php/Electric_Pentacle
Gafford, Sam. 100 years ago today. William Hope Hodgson. 19 Apr 2018. Web. 28 Oct 2019. https://williamhopehodgson.wordpress.com/2018/04/19/100-years-ago-today/
Gafford, Sam. William Hope Hodgson: dreamer on the borderland. William Hope Hodgson. 30 Jul 2012. Web. 27 Oct 2019. https://williamhopehodgson.wordpress.com/a-short-biography-of-william-hope-hodgson/
Hodgson, William Hope. Health from scientific exercise. Cassell’s Magazine, Jun-Nov 1903. 27: 602-607.
Katherine. Victorian Hottie of the Week: William Hope Hodgson. Victorianarchronists. 11 Feb 2014. Web. 28 Oct 2020. https://victorianachronists.wordpress.com/2014/02/11/victorian-hottie-of-the-week-william-hope-hodgson/#:~:text=Apparently%2C%20Mr.,a%20bit%20throughout%20his%20youth.
Savlov, Marc. Scary stories for thinking man. Austin Chronicle. 8 Mar 2002. Web. 27 Oct 2019. https://www.austinchronicle.com/screens/2002-03-08/84931/
Thanks for this. I’d never heard of him. Just went and got a few compilations of his writings for my kindle.
Fucking awesome. Right now I’m reading Badass Ultimate Deathmatch, a book about historical ass-kickers of yore, and the writing style looks suspiciously like yours. Did you take part in the creation of that piece of work as well?
Great article! This is another reminder to say “fuck coinnventional society and their ways,” and go do awesome shit your own way. Thanks for the greatest content in the game, Jamie. Your writings over the years have changed the way I train, and even live in general.
Interesting read, rape fixation aside. Clark Ashton Smith has to be the one for vocabulary although knowing worlds like verdure or antepast doesn’t seem to make them useful.
Hahaha- I don’t know why sailors treated that as their sole hobby, but sailors are an odd bunch. I’ve not read Smith- I just came across his name researching this article. you have any suggested readings from him?
I don’t know if you’d enjoy it, it’s not really horror so much as fantasy/comedy with the underlying premise that humanity is insignificant. Maybe try The Coming of the White Worm.