The William Hope Hodgson thread

[Raul Urraca]

Quote Originally Posted by Mr. Veech

Quote Originally Posted by Gnosticangel In A Dark Light wrote, "I've recently continued my struggle through 'The Night Land', and have now reached the dizzying heights of page 64. " I can attest that it got much much easier by the 20th or so read! Now it's just like another form of normal English, like the language in Eddison's Worm books, or William Blake, or even Anthony Burgess and Mervyn Peake. Some eventual translation seems to take place in the brain upon literary immersion. There is probably a formal term for the process of growing familiar with an British author's idiosyncratic or artificial dialect, grammar or vocabulary, but I don't know what it is. I had a similar experience with M.R. James. It took me some time to adapt to what I initially saw as stilted prose. Aickman, on the other hand, wrote with such clarity that I was able to jump right in and appreciate his actual work. I've never read Hodgson. I'm somewhat hesitant to do so given the sample of Hodgson's writing James (TLO's James) posted in another thread. The amount of superfluous commas I saw was so bad that I could barely read the passage in question. I hope that wasn't a representative sample.

I saw the quote- I believe it was from a bad edition of The House on the Borderland. The comma usage isn't perfect, but it's not unreadably bad like the posted excerpt- the errors must have been added in the printing process. The Project Gutenberg version, which I've read, is fine.