“And never did all that great and terrible Land grow stale upon the soul of any, from birth until death; and by this you shall know the constant wonder of it, and that sense of enemies in the night about us, which ever filled the heart and spirit of all Beholders ...”
—William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land, chapter 4 (1912).

In 1972 I read William Hope Hodgson’s The Boats of the Glen Carrig (1907) and The Night Land (1912), in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series with the Robert LoGrippo covers (here, and here). Immediately enthralled, I have reread both many times since, as well as Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland (1908) and his tales of Carnacki, the occult detective. Always I grapple with my inability to map the territory Hodgson describes or to grasp the nature and motivations of the creatures populating his worlds. In fact, this is what pulls me back into the texts, and keeps me scratching futilely for comprehension and closure. How unlike this effect to, say, Middle Earth’s or Narnia’s, both of which I first entered in 1969. In those places, maps abound; nothing is truly terra incognita. As a fallen angel, even Sauron can be understood, and the orcs are recognizably human, and indeed quite chatty about their misdeeds and desires. Not so the denizens of The Night Land (which is Earth millions or possibly billions of years into the future), or of the mid-Atlantic Land of Lonesomeness and the “weed-choked sea” encountered by the ill-fated Glen Carrig.

In his his superb William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird: Possibilities of the Dark, Timothy S. Murphy calls this feeling “decognitive estrangement.” Every time I reread Hodgson’s work, the Silent Ones and the five unblinking, mountainous Watchers, or the Thing That Made Search or the weed-men, remain as inscrutable yet ominous as ever. No intervening growth in experience on my part causes them to yield to my reason. If anything, while I know more about Middle Earth now than I did in 1969, I may know even less about The Night Land. The resistance to my logic and the disruption of my bourgeois certainties has always powered my love of Hodgson’s work; and Murphy’s study has at last given me a toolbox of concepts that help me understand why I cannot interpret Hodgson’s worlds. More than that, Murphy shows me how Hodgson’s singular vision of anethical places, his cosmic and entropic sensibilities, and his foreclosure of meaning together launched the genre and/or mode we now call “the Weird” in fiction.

Murphy accomplishes a great deal in just 180 pages—William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird has much to offer not only scholars of speculative fiction but also, as Murphy himself makes clear, researchers within Victorian and Edwardian cultural studies writ large. The study sets a high bar as one of the first releases in Bloomsbury Academic’s Perspectives on Fantasy series (I would expect no less with Brian Attebery, Dimitra Fimi, and Matthew Sangster as the series editors). Murphy judiciously combines sophisticated theoretical frameworks with insightful close readings of Hodgson’s texts—that is, he gives me both the forest and the trees. He uses terms of art when applicable but does not toss around empty jargon. He acknowledges where evidence is sparse, forcing him to provisional or speculative conclusions in some cases. He’s an enthusiast, but a cautious one. Above all, Murphy openly rests his ideas upon and/or reads against the thinking of H. P. Lovecraft, Darko Suvin, Emily Alder, Kelly Hurley, Sam Gafford, and China Miéville among writers of and about speculative fiction, and that of Ernst Bloch, Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, and Fredric Jameson among philosophers and literary critics (and this is to name only the main individuals whom Murphy addresses in his wide-ranging exploration). William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird brilliantly synthesizes what these and others have written about Hodgson or about the broader philosophical themes Murphy discerns in Hodsgon’s work, while advancing Murphy’s own theses in compelling fashion. Anyone looking to understand Hodgson will now start here.

The book’s twenty-nine-page introduction, “Decognition and the Labor of the Weird,” offers a convincing taxonomy of the genre, making clear and defensible distinctions between the Weird and its sibling genres of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and the Gothic, even while recognizing that “fuzzy sets” (Attebery’s term, used by Murphy) exist to thwart even the most thorough-going classification schemes. (I wonder, for instance, where the more recently evolved “grimdark” sub-genre in fantasy fits into Murphy’s taxonomy.) The introduction should garner a wide audience in its own right, especially among readers interested in the genre’s origins and outlines more than in Hodgson specifically. A foundational principle of its analysis deserves a long quotation:

The critical conception of weird fiction used in this study, which builds on Miéville, defines it not as anti-cognitive (and therefore irrationalist, ideological, and reactionary in Suvin’s terms) narration but rather as decognitive narration, that is, narrative that takes the logical universalism and normative subjectivity implied by triumphalist scientific rationality as objects of suspicion, evasion, and disruption. (p. 4)

Decognitive narration, coupled with a stringent materialism that precludes theological explanations, yields another distinguishing hallmark of weird fiction: “ever greater divergences of life conditions between human narrator/reader and the unhuman entities it encounters, and consequently ever greater divergence of value, ethics, and sensation that produce incomprehension and fear” (p. 17).

What follows is a tour de force of balanced exposition, literary historical review, and use of complex theoretical devices to demonstrate how the Weird emerged in the late nineteenth century as an early warning against the dominant strain of positivism within the sciences and proto-science fiction, while differentiating itself equally from the moralistic telos of the proto-fantasy and the atavistic urges of the neo-Gothic horror story emerging at the same time. I can hardly do justice to Murphy’s analysis in a short review, but want to emphasize how seamlessly he integrates discussion of “nihilist humanism” (a term of Miéville’s) with Bloch’s philosophy of hope; makes use of Lovecraft’s inescapable ur-text, Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), while indicating how severely and necessarily Lovecraft’s racism, xenophobia, and misogyny truncate the use we can make of his ideas; and deploys Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza (with nods to Marx and Engels, as well as Nietzsche) to give us “the tools to extend the decognitive critique of rationalist universalism to what I [Murphy] will call an anethical critique of moral universalism” (p. 14, italics in original).

The main body of William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird revolves primarily around the themes of space and time in Hodgson’s works. Murphy makes and amply justifies a key insight relating to Hodgson’s settings:

Hodgson’s texts are among the earliest to be constructed around the impossibility of achieving the type of narrative closure that is normally characteristic of science fiction or fantasy, and my claim is that this refusal of closure—I suggest we call it “foreclosure”—is explicitly figured in the tales’ spatial settings. (p. 81)

Murphy, using quotes from Hodgson’s fiction to especially good effect, demonstrates how unstable, unintelligible, and unlocatable Hodgson’s landscapes are, both to the characters and to the reader. As he says about the Sargasso Sea, site of Glen Carrig and of Hodgson’s many maritime short stories (most of which are also weird), it “is not quite a nowhere, which would literally make it a utopia or paradise, but rather always an elsewhere, a place out of place” (p. 103). Citing Alder, Murphy makes the case that The Night Land is essentially a seascape as well: mostly obscured, only partially observable from the upper reaches of the eight-mile-tall (!) pyramidal Great Redoubt (like the crow’s nest on a ship), navigable only “by combining compass readings with primitive ‘pilotage’ using landmarks” (p. 89).

Beyond that, epistemological categories of cartography and nomenclature have atrophied in The Night Land over the millions of years:

All these place names register an assignment of abstract or possible signification that nevertheless remains ambiguous and untranslatable in its details, like the writing of a long-dead civilization, a sophisticated cipher comparable to the Voynich Manuscript or the Codex Seraphinanus, or even the language of an alien species. (p. 121)

Geographic knowledge has become so fragile and evasive in this far future that “he [the unnamed narrator] must often travel through dark regions that no one in the pyramid has ever mapped, and even those that have been extensively mapped occupy space differently when one approaches them” (p. 122). The journey the nameless narrator makes through the deceptive and amorphous terrain of The Night Land ends without either the possessive cognitive mapping championed by science fiction or the redemptive eucatastrophic mapping at the heart of fantasy. Instead, it’s “a voyage of renunciation or loss, much closer to a funeral procession than a celebration” (p. 123). As Murphy stresses, once the journey of the novel’s protagonist has ended, no human beings will ever again so widely traverse, let alone reclaim, the in- and abhuman Night Land.

Murphy likewise makes a strong case for Hodgson’s status as a pioneer in the fictional deployment of cosmic, abyssal time, situating Hodgson as a mediator of the rapid late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discoveries in geology, biology, and (astro)physics. Murphy reads The House on the Borderland in light of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), and against the backdrop of the scientific works of Darwin, Charles Lyell, Gödel, Bohr, Heisenberg, and especially Lord Kelvin. In a penetrating and counter-intuitive move, Murphy uses Agamben’s study of Judeo-Christian messianic concepts, and Benjamin’s philosophy of history, to frame Hodgsonian end-times as doggedly anti-theological, the epitome of non-supernatural cosmic creativity.

Many readers of The Night Land, and more still who give up on the book, gag on its prose; The Night Land is a famously “difficult read.” For The Night Land, Hodgson devised an eccentric, faux seventeenth- or eighteenth-century style, convoluted and orotund, which even Lovecraft found “grotesque and absurd.” A few critics have supported Hodgson’s stylistic choice (Greer Gilman in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature [2012], Nigel Brown in “An Apology for the Linguistic Architecture of The Night Land” [2001]), but Murphy mounts an innovative defense. He asks us to see the difficulty of reading as an intrinsic element of weird fiction, a twinning of the reader’s efforts with those of the characters’:

... the labor of the weird and the resistance to it often (but not always) transform the human subject who undergoes them, and those transformations are materially reflected in the language of Hodgson’s tales, imposing a labor of the weird on the reader as well as on the characters. (p. 2)

In Hodgson, the weird is inseparable from its expression and its reception—the reader must be estranged from current reality in all ways. As Murphy stresses, Hodgson’s “stylistic and formal strategies [are] centered on the problem of how to refer to or represent the non-/un-/abhuman” (p. 42). In so doing, Hodgson reminds me of Christian mystics such as Jakob Böhme, Hildegard of Bingen, and Teresa of Ávila, and of alchemists such as “Basil Valentine” and Michael Maier, who each in idiosyncratic ways contorted syntax and made strange their vocabulary in attempts to represent the interaction of the human with that which is not human and with that which is cosmic. Equally, Hodgson points forward to the varied linguistic permutations of the twentieth century. As Murphy asserts: “weird fiction constitutes an explicitly self-reflexive and experimental genre that is, in its own unique ways, comparable to the broader formal experiments of high modernist and postmodernist fiction that developed alongside and after it” (p. 49). I agree fully with that assessment, and would love to see studies putting The Night Land in conversation with The Waste Land (1922), Finnegans Wake (1939), Dadaist and Surrealist plays and manifestos, Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1963), and so on.

I have few complaints about William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird, none material. Given his close scrutiny of the depleted environments described in The House on the Borderland and The Night Land, Murphy might have connected his analysis more fully with the scholarship on eco-lit, as Steve Asselin does in his “Plentiful Desolations: Anthropocentric Bias and the End-World Ecologies of H.G. Wells and William Hope Hodgson” (published in 2024—that is, a year after Murphy’s book). Similarly, given Murphy’s detailed coverage of the scientific discoveries and debates informing Hodgson’s work, I suggest he might have fruitfully drawn on studies such as Peter Morton’s The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination, 1860-1900 (1984), Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present by Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail (2011), “Victorian Thermodynamics and the Novel: Problems and Prospects” by Allen MacDuffie (2011), and Victorian Contingencies: Experiments in Literature, Science, and Play by Tina Young Choi (2021). Likewise, in his insightful discussion of how Hodgson “perform[s] a decognitive destructuring on the previously stable categories of nineteenth-century biology” (p. 99), Murphy would have found allies in Ulf Houe (“The Protoplasmic Imagination: Ernst Haeckel and H.P. Lovecraft,” 2022), Luz Elena Ramirez (“Darwin and the Nautical Gothic in William Hope Hodgson’s The Boats of the ‘Glen-Carrig’,” 2018), and Ursula Seibold-Bultmann (“Monster Soup: The Microscope and Victorian Fantasy,” 2000). Indeed, the latter makes a point that would bolster Murphy’s defense of Hodgson’s ornate diction: “During the heyday of natural history in Britain (c. 1820–70), the microscope revealed myriads of shapes and creatures so utterly unfamiliar that writers on the subject resorted to flamboyant prose in order to render them intelligible.”

More importantly, however, William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird does what the best books do: It makes me think hard and it spurs my imagination. I wonder if The Night Land is the first novel to feature a skyscraper as a prominent setting, and about the extent to which Hodgson may have followed modern building design from the Crystal Palace to the Columbian World’s Fairs? I wonder if he saw John Singleton Copley’s painting Watson and the Shark (1778), which was on display in England throughout the nineteenth century and was almost certainly reproduced in Victorian periodicals, and whether he enjoyed “The Ocean-Chart” in The Hunting of the Snark (1876). I wonder how many of the first readers of The Boats of the Glen-Carrig, and his short stories also depicting deserted ships found in the Sargasso Sea, recalled the reports of the Rosalie, found abandoned and undamaged in 1840 off Bermuda, with sails set, cargo intact, and captain’s papers secure (as the Times of London noted: “Of her crew no intelligence has been received”), or the Mary Celeste, found adrift off the Azores in 1872, seaworthy, cargo and crew’s belongings untouched, missing one lifeboat, with the crew never seen again (in 1884 Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a short story about the incident). Murphy’s dive into Hodgson’s use of space and place prompts me to revisit Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958), and Pierre Nora’s Realms of Memory (1998). And so on.

In his “envoi,” Murphy identifies the handful of authors who are clearly influenced by Hodgson, including C. L. Moore & Henry Kuttner, Michael Moorcock, M. John Harrison, Greg Bear, Charlie Jane Anders, and, above all, Jeff VanderMeer, and China Miéville. At the same time, William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird begins with an assertion that Hodgson is “an anomaly who presents a challenge to both literary and intellectual history” (p. xiv), so much so that (riffing off a theme raised by Benjamin), Murphy waggishly suggests The Night Land might be “weirder even than the weird … the perfect work of an unknown, unnamed, fleeting genre it simultaneously invents and destroys (entropic romance?)” (p. 168).

If all this is so, how do we assess Hodgson’s legacy? I agree with Murphy that Hodgson was “a profound though untrained, non-professional thinker” (p. xxvi) whose work may form “the foundation for a counter-history of weird fiction, one less compromised by Lovecraft’s racism and elitism” (p. 29). Beyond the few writers working explicitly in a Hodgsonian vein, I see Hodgson’s pervasive if subtle influence on much of today’s speculative fiction. Many of his tropes are ones that are now part of the background machinery of fantastika, for example the “Big Dumb Objects” of science fiction, the traversing of estranged and degraded landscapes, the collision between human and cosmic time-scales, and the defense of a “last refuge of humankind” against abcanny beings. I think of John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (1951), James Dashner’s Maze Runner (2009-) series, and Veronica Roth’s Divergent series (2011-2014); Zion in The Matrix (1999, plus all the multi-eyed tentacular squiddies!); the proto-molecule and Ring in James S. A. Corey’s Expanse books (2011-2021); the Baubles, Ghostie gubbins, and bone speakers in Alastair Reynolds’s Revenger books (2016-2020); and the hybrid fungoid creatures in Mike Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts (2014), the Last of Us game (2013) and streamed series (2023-), and in the movie The Gorge (2025).  

I think, too, of the squishy, ever-hungry monsters ceaselessly swarming the Scholomance in Naomi Novik’s trilogy of that name (2020-2022), the enigmatic planet-killing Architects emerging from “unspace” and the bizarre ruins of the Originators in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The Final Architecture trilogy (2021-2023), the remapping of reality and the unintelligible gods in Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors (2023), the eternal battle between the endlessly reincarnated Horologists of the Deep Stream and the vampiric Atemporals in David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (2014) and Slade House (2015), the massive Time Tombs guarded by The Shrike in Hyperion by Dan Simmons (1989), the implacable Insects besieging The Fourlands in Steph Swainston’s novels, the boundless antediluvian forest full of weird and menacing creatures in B. Catling’s The Vorrh (2012), and the gill-men, flukes, dead life, and Living Mud in the post-apocalyptic city-fortress in Alex Pheby’s Mordew (2020). I am particularly intrigued by prose that attempts to estrange in the way that of The Night Land does, for instance, the stilted faux-Victorian diction (“Lumon-speak”) of Kier Eagan in Severance (2022-), the neo-Enlightenment stylings in Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota (2016-2021) quartet, and the narrative choices in Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth (2020).

I don’t know how much these arguable examples of Hodgson’s influence support the notion of a Hodgsonian revival (along the lines, say, of the Melvillean Revival of the 1920s); I would be curious to know Murphy’s view of that. I do know that Murphy’s William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird rightfully centers Hodgson at the core of weird fiction. More than that, Murphy makes a convincing case for Hodgson as an important thinker who reflected many of the nineteenth century’s scientific and ethical debates, and who presaged modernist challenges to semantic and ontological comprehension of the world. William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird: Possibilities of the Dark is a literary study of the first water.