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5.0 out of 5 stars
A "classic of the first water" - strange stuff indeed, July 3 2003
The book opens simply:"NOW WE had been five days in the boats, and in all this time made no discovering of land. Then upon the morning of the sixth day came there a cry from the bo'sun, who had the command of the lifeboat, that there was something which might be land afar upon our larboard bow; but it was very low lying, and none could tell whether it was land or but a morning cloud. Yet, because there was the beginning of hope within our hearts, we pulled wearily towards it, and thus, in about an hour, discovered it to be indeed the coast of some flat country." No hint of what fate befell the Glen Carrig - we are swept immediately into unknown lands, filled with, as H.P. Lovecraft wrote, a "variety of malign marvels". Hodgson's strengths are his personal familiarity with the sea and his ability to create an atmosphere of creeping dread, of the nearness of forces of unknown potency and hostility to humanity. He considered three of his novels ("The House on the Borderland", "The Boats of the Glenn Carrig", and "The Ghost Pirates") to be essentially parts of the same tale. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, but there is a unifying thread of the intrusion into the everyday world of non-human entities bent soley on the destruction of the principle characters. In "The Boats of the Glen Carrig", Hodgson expands the territory of his short stories to novel length. Familiar elements are all there - the ship stranded in the Sargasso, the strange things seen at sea, and the eventual attack by monstrous forces. Unfortunately, also present is a mawkish romance and an attempt at "archaic" language that, while nowhere near as tiresome as that in "The Nightland", still wears on the modern reader. BUT!! Don't let that put you off! I know of NO other writer, not Lovecraft, nor Machen, nor Blackwood, who can create and sustain an atmosphere of creeping dread, the sense of horrors *just* out of sight. Very highly recommended.
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