Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder II: The Gateway of the Monster | review by Rafe McGregor

The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson

Wordsworth Editions, paperback, £4.99, July 2006, ISBN 9781840225297

The Carnacki narratives all have a similar structure or what one might less charitably call a formula. Each begins with a dinner for five at Carnacki’s home, 472 Cheyne Walk, in Chelsea, which is the precursor to the story itself, represented as his post-prandial yarn-spinning. Once Carnacki has told his tale, there is time for one or more questions from his guests before he dismisses them with what is obviously meant to be a quirky, “Out you go!” Within this schema, Hodgson uses a device that appears contrived or even superfluous a century later: the cases are narrated in the first person, not by Carnacki or Hodgson, but an authorial surrogate, with the all too familiar name of ‘Dodgson’, so that what one reads is a report (by Dodgson) of a report (by Carnacki), which can make the sequence of events described feel remote and even lacklustre. The convention harks back to the origin of novels in histories and travelogues and was used to inaugurate literary modernism by authors such as Jospeh Conrad so Hodgson can hardly be blamed for what, in retrospect, is a poor artistic choice. ‘The Gateway of the Monster’ is one of Carnacki’s supernatural cases and an excellent introduction to the methods and equipment he employs, combining science and superstition with a camera, an electric pentacle, a water circle, and a cat. Less so, the case introduces the worldview that was so important to Hodgson and the other pioneers of weird fiction and also makes tantalising references to the “Black Veil” and “Moving Fur” investigations.