THE DEEP ONES: "The Hog" by William Hope Hodgson

"The Hog" by William Hope Hodgson

Discussion begins November 21.

First published in the January, 1947 issue of Weird Tales



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff4/hog.htm
http://www.hypnogoria.com/html/hog.html

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?78136

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Carnacki the Ghost Finder
H.P. Lovecraft's Book of Horror
The World's Greatest Horror Stories

MISCELLANY

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnacki
http://tinyurl.com/chl8u3z
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/jun/30/thomas-carnacki-supernatur...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JvunsCiyEg

Reading 'The Hog' online, wife and I decided to have ham for Thanksgiving this year. ;-)

I had forgotten that this story was included in the Night Shade Books edition of The House on the Borderland. Hodgson's "Swine Cycle", perhaps?

As it was, I had, psychically, that dreadful soiled feeling which the healthy human always experiences when he comes too closely in contact with certain Outer Monstrosities. Do you fellows remember how I had just the same feeling when the Hand came too near me in the "Gateway" case?

"Outer Monstrosities" sounds intriguing. While I know WHH's tales of sea terror pretty well, I'm not so familiar with Carnacki. Do these play a role in the other stories?

CORRECTION. The January, 1947 Weird Tales seems to have been the first publication of "The Hog", although isfdb.org has the book shown below as first in the bibliography. This is confirmed by Jeremy Lassen in the NSB edition.

Well, that's the first Carnacki story I've read, and it didn't cultivate an appetite for more. While I am generally game for demonic evocation, I was irked by the surfeit of scare quotes and psychical gobbledigook.

Having the whole thing embedded in Carnacki's post-prandial parlor telling seemed reminiscent of "The Upper Berth."

I'm curious if Hodgson had the Gadarene swine consciously in mind when he elected to have his spectral menace be a piggie.

Towards the end, Carnacki alleges, "all positive force is predatory." I wonder about the basis for such a generalization, and what he means by "positive" in that context.

Is that supposed to be a picture of Carnacki's Hogge in the WT cover in #1?

>6 paradoxosalpha:

I'm not sure about the A.R. Tilburne cover, but Lee Brown Coye is attributed for the inside art. I believe this is it:

>3 gwendetenebre: I read the other Carnacki tales quite a while ago, but I think the metaphysical background in them is consistent. I wonder where Hodgson got the basic system. Rudolf Steiner?

>5 paradoxosalpha: The terminology is pretty clunky, isn't it? 'infernal hillock of monstrosity' would not even make a good name for a band. 'clouds of nebulosity' is redundant, given than nebulosity means something cloudy. At least the 'gargantuan corridors' were not Cyclopean or non-Euclidean!

I thought the story brought out the horror of physical and psychic tension and exhaustion pretty well. The anticlimactic, long explanation at the end is much too much.

I want a set of spectrum circles for my den!

I wonder what it is with hogs for Hodgson? in The House on the Borderland you have hog-men peering into the windows, which is supposed to be the acme of horror apparently. So hogs are to Hodgson as squid are to HPL? This doesn't translate very well for me: I see hogs as emblems of greed, not malice. Apparently hog farmers would agree with Hodgson but I haven't had any such experience.

If you search for the word 'diafaeon', you will find a suggestion by one Martin that this is a typo for 'diapason', which would make sense since this is a sonic reference.

>5 paradoxosalpha: again. I think 'positive force' means not passive.

>5 paradoxosalpha:

It was hard for me to get a fix on the general mise-en-scène amidst all the pseudo-scientific apparatus and terminology, but I kept envisioning a cross between the art of Steve Ditko and the ludicrous (yet entertaining) battle between Tony Curtis and "ancient Indian medicine man" Misquamacus in the 1978 film THE MANITOU.

I have a couple of questions in regard to this serial and this story in particular. This is the first Carnacki story I've read as well, and I feel like a child who wandered into a movie that's halfway over. It's apparent that Hodges is really pushing this 'Outer World' thing with his etherial psychic clouds that hover over the atmosphere, but does he delve further into this psychic biology further? Why was the manifestation a hog? Was that it's 'natural' form or did it take on that appearance at the discretion of it's intended victim, Bain? Also, what was that dome thing and why was it there? Was the blueish dome with the 3 green bands some form of divine intervention, a psychic defense mechanism created by Carnacki or another psychic manifestation that happened to notice a similar (& smaller?) one trying to feed off in the material plane, and thusly wanted to feed off the hog? Hodge's descriptive prose was very engaging, maybe a little bit too much, I felt he was dwelling too much on a certain thing and having difficulty moving on with the story. Anyway, I might read another one of these stories to see if Hodges answers these questions.

We also see an example of weird colors in this one, although of a decidedly recognizable sort. The idea of a something supernatural that is not quite recognizable by human senses is still touched upon in "The Hog", however. This time it is of the audible variety :

The way in which my brain insisted that the silence was trickling round the room, interests me enormously; for I was either in a state approximating a phase of madness, or else I was, psychically, tuned to some abnormal pitch of awaredness and sensitiveness in which silence had ceased to be an abstract quality, and had become to me a definite concrete element, much as (to use a stupidly crude illustration), the invisible moisture of the atmosphere becomes a visible and concrete element when it becomes deposited as water.

So, the absence of sound becomes a sound itself - one that moves about. This would have been written after Bierce's "The Damned Thing" but before HPL's "Colour Out of Space" (keeping in mind that this story was published well after the deaths of those authors), both of which explored similar themes.

This is the last story in Carnacki the Ghost Finder, so I wouldn't expect that questions left open here are answered anywhere else. Certainly, the other Carnacki I've read ("The Thing Invisible") doesn't.

>12 AndreasJ:

So 'The Hog' is the last Carnacki story then, that's too bad because he hints at a following story with the 'door' to the 'Outer World' and a promise to delve deeper into the 'physics' of these psychic clouds. Anyway, I find this story to really be heavily influenced by Lovecraft's work particularly "From Beyond", the only real difference is the rival turns into the client in this rendition.

>13 lammassu:

Not that the similarities aren't there, but keep in mind that Hodgson died in 1918, so this story could not have been influenced by HPL, who was only just beginning to find his publication-legs at that time, mainly in two or three amateur journals. It's a bit confusing since "The Hog" wasn't published until 1947.

Conversely, "From Beyond" was written in 1920 (but published in 1934), which was before Lovecraft discovered Hodgson, so there's no direct influence in that direction either.

I should probably add I don't know for certain if "The Hog" is the last-written Carnacki story. I'd assumed the collection was organized chronologically, but I don't know if I had any particular reason to do so.

Anyway, I though that "The Hog" was significantly weaker than "The Thing Invisible", which in turn was not WHH's best work. I'm not feeling a great deal of urgency reading the rest of Carnacki. Unlike, well, almost anyone I've read in recent years, I think I appreciate Hodgson better in novel format than in short story.

>15 AndreasJ:

I agree! I prefer Hodgson in novel form, too. I enjoyed The Ghost Pirates most of all.

The NSB edition notes that in addition to the original six tales, "The Hog" and two other Carnacki stories were added to the 1948 Arkham House edition and were probably heavily edited by August Derleth. I'm not sure where these stories might actually fit into the overall Carnacki story arc, if one even exists.

>15 AndreasJ:
Jungian moment perhaps? This concept of an 'outer world' seems pretty prevalent in contemporary weird fiction, and while I'm not familiar with the biography of hodgeson, the two stories do mirror each other rather well. What bothered me with Hodgeson's prose is the constant "am I understood?" line whenever he's explaining his experiences. Just felt that tripped up the pacing of the story.

>17 lammassu:

My own post in >16 gwendetenebre: makes me wonder how much Derleth might have meddled with the original story. I gather it had to exist in some form, since WHH does refer to "The Hog" in his letters (noted in the NSB edition). Since I'm not familiar with the original Carnacki tales, I'm not sure how much this one deviates from the norm, if it does at all.

Did anyone else notice this diagram at the end of the "Online Versions" link at http://www.hypnogoria.com/html/hog.html ?

"We nodded our assent, and Carnacki continued".

And continued and continued. Like most people here, this is my first Carnacki tale. This story had its moments – Bains grunting like a pig while he’s unconscious in Carnacki’s arms, the Hog as an appropriate manifestation – in sight and sound -- of malevolent psychic forces. And this story is interesting as an example of Victorian and Edwardian attempts to put the occult – here psychic forces – on a rational, consistent, and scientific basis. I liked the idea of the ether belt outside of the earth being the component, by analogy, of other forms of matters and from which beings like the Hog are formed. I also liked Carnacki’s explanation that psychic dangers and impressions can be confused in the brain with physical forces. And the idea of the soul just wandering off and, eventually, being separated from you was a logical extension of the idea of a soul.

But Hodgson, at the end, just goes on too long for my tastes. I could really keep the action straight in my mind in regards to Carnacki's physical apparatus -- but that may have been due to fatigue and boredom when reading this. I suspect I'll like this story better on rereading it.

> 18 Did anyone else notice this diagram

Yes, I think it might have been my favorite part.

I'd like to know why "astral" is spelled with that third "a." That's the way it is in Dutch, but I haven't seen that in English before. My google-fu for the occasion is stumped by some Star Wars Jedi character named "Astraal Vor."

I managed to get the Night Shade Books Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson over the summer, and reread "The Hog" 30-odd years after reading the Grafton paperback of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder (with an afterword from Iain Sinclair).

I had to wonder, having now read a lot more weird fiction that I had under my belt in 1990 or 1991, how much August Derleth had changed or added to the story. The tone seemed a bit off compared to the other stories (too many "do you understand?" type interjections in the narrative, perhaps; and the deux ex machina ending is echoed in more than one of Derleth's Mythos tales).

Sinclair's afterword exhibts no such reservations: "What a magnificently climactic seance, or mind duel, between Carnacki and the ungoverned furies of the 'Outer Circle'...The Hog is Hodgson's most nakedly Jungian setpiece; fetid waves of archetypes sweep repeatedly against the thin walls of quotidian reality". Although, that said, he had earlier characterised the story as "a cleverly doctored out-take from The House on the Borderland, {..} was worth the development money it took to re-emerge as the blockbusting Night Land."

Taking the Carnacki stories as a whole, I think it's clear that they were written for commercial reasons, hoping to follow the success of Blackwood's Dr Silence stories (and as Sinclair notes, the "real life" ghostbuster Elliot O'Donnell. And yet, genuine strangeness, as well as psychological truth (I've noted somewhere on here that Carnacki's fear, moments of "funk", stood out on my first reading of these stories) appear often enough for the stories to be worth reading (and, indeed, rereading). I've retained my affection for them.

>21 housefulofpaper: John Hinton has an article in Sargasso: The Journal of William Hope Hodgson, "Foreshadowing Carnacki: Algernon Blackwood's 'Smith: An Episode in a Lodging House'" argues, from internal evidence from Hodgson's work, that August Derleth did not substantially alter Hodgson's tale. In particular, he notes that the Carnacki tale "The Whistling Man" mentions an earlier episode with a "grunting man".