Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder IX: The Hog | review by Rafe McGregor

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

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

There is speculation that this was the last Carnacki story written by Hodgson, very likely during the war, and that his death interrupted either its completion or submission. The fact that Betty submitted ‘The Haunted Jarvee’ posthumously suggests that ‘The Hog’ may have been incomplete. Publication in Weird Tales was due to the efforts of Derleth, who would publish it a second time in the same year, in his edition of Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder. Given Derleth’s reputation for robust ‘editing’, I wonder if the story wasn’t actually completed by him or at least revised extensively. It is the longest Carnacki case by far, well into the novelette or novella range (depending on your preferred definitions) at about seventeen thousand words, and the only one divided into numbered parts (seven). It is also crafted with skill and with considerable attention to pace and rhythm, which makes the length entertaining instead of onerous. The investigation takes place at 472 Cheyne Walk, in Carnacki’s rather sinister sounding ‘experimenting room’, when one of his friends, a doctor, refers a patient called Bains to him. Bains is, it seems, haunted by a giant pig (the ‘HOG’), who comes to him in his dreams, which, in turn, plague his waking life. Carnacki puts his room to good use, conducting a variety of dangerous experiments on him as he attempts to understand what the ghost is and how he can free Bains from it. The hog is indeed supernatural and what is particularly interesting about this case is that it includes the most detailed discussion of the worldview underpinning the stories, as I mentioned in my comments on ‘The Thing Invisible’. In essence, Carnacki’s ‘Outer Monsters’ are both physical and psychic, living in the ‘Outer Circle’, a belt of outer space five million or more miles thick. This region creates psychic phenomena on Earth in the same way that flesh and blood produces consciousness in (some) living things on the same planet. Is this a fully-fledged worldview? Certainly not as much as in other pioneers of weird fiction or even in Hodgson’s other work, such as The House on the Borderland and The Night Land, but it does replace the less convincing recourses to Judeo-Christian and Celtic mythology in several of the previous stories. Carnacki mentions “the ‘Gateway’ case” (‘The Gateway of the Monster’) twice and “the Black Veil Case” yet again.

Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder VIII: The Haunted Jarvee | review by Rafe McGregor

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

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

As far as I can tell from various online sources, this story was completed by Hodgson before his death, found among his papers by Betty, and submitted to The Premier Magazine by her in 1919. She declined a request to revise it by the editor, David Whitelaw, but he published it anyway ten years later. The reasons for his tardiness remain unknown and I wonder if the decision to publish wasn’t either part of or a precursor to the revival of interest in Hodgson in the nineteen thirties. The Jarvee is a haunted sailing ship, aboard which Carnacki travels at the bidding of its owner, Captain Thompson, for the purposes of explaining the strange weather phenomena that seem to accompany its every voyage. The vessel is beset by shadows, squalls, the death of two sailors, more shadows, mist, lightning, silence, more shadows still, and near-capsizing, all of which Hodgson depicts in a compelling and captivating way and no doubt with great authenticity. While ‘The Haunted Jarvee’ seems to be the most popular of the posthumous cases, I found it disappointing in consequence of a pervasive vagueness and opacity. We have no idea of the voyage’s location beyond ‘the Atlantic’, explanation of both the cause of the weather and Carnacki’s attempts to counter it are restricted to ‘attractive vibrations’ and ‘repellent vibrations’ respectively, and the supernatural rationale for the haunting is dismissed with, “The vast unknown it is vain to speculate upon”. One would have hoped that, as an occult detective, such speculation was precisely Carnacki’s job. There is nonetheless an often-ignored point of interest worth mentioning. Referring to his ‘Saaamaaa Ritual’, Carnacki suggests that Arkright, one of his dinner guests, has a better knowledge of magic than he does, a casual aside that raises a host of possibilities…

Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder VII: The Thing Invisible | 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 first story in this edition, the only one published in The New Magazine, and the last published before Hodgson’s death. The haunted premises is a chapel, in the fictional village of Burtontree in South Kent, where Carancki is summoned by a client. This is one of Carnacki’s natural rather than supernatural cases and has at least two points of interest. The first is further evidence of the candour and eloquence Hodgson affords Carnacki in describing the fear he experiences in his ghost-finding. There is a particularly effective passage in the middle of the narrative of which the following sentence is representative: “I tell you, that no one who has not been through these kinds of experiences, has any idea of the sheer, actual physical pain attendant upon, and resulting from, the intense nerve strain that ghostly fright sets up in the human system.” The same is true of non-ghostly fright and Hodgson was clearly no stranger to both fear and the courage required to overcome it. Second, there is more worldbuilding here, the connection between the ‘ab-human’ and ‘ab-normal’ on the one hand and the ‘Outer World’ and ‘Force from the Outside’ fleshed out in a little more detail, as a precursor to ‘The Hog’, where it will be explained in full. Carnacki puts his expertise in “Lightless Photography’ to work in his investigation and responds to Dodgson’s interrogation with an especially comprehensive and convincing set of answers. The weakest element of the tale is probably its title, which is not only unenlightening but has already been used in part.

Theaker’s Week! (w/c 27 July 2026)

Since buying a Kindle Colorsoft in one of Amazon’s many sales, I haven’t had much use for it. For colour stuff like comics, a Fire Tablet is better, and for prose, the colour layer makes the Colorsoft much darker than other ereaders, so it had been gathering dust. But this week I had the idea of using it for storing and playing my Audible books and it’s been great for that – I can have it sitting on my desk while I'm working in a way that would be distracting if it were my phone or a tablet.

On Monday I used the Colorsoft to listen to the last few episodes of Welcome to Our Village, Please Invade Carefully, The Complete Series 1 and 2, *** a Radio 4 science fiction comedy written by Eddie Robson, and script-edited by Arthur Matthews. The first series got it off to a good start, with tv legends Peter Davison and Jan Francis playing the parents of village rebel leader Katherine Parkinson. Season two loses something with the departure of Julian Rhind-Tutt as the alien leader, but there were still some very funny episodes.

On Tuesday I finished a French-language album by Jean-Michael Charlier and Albert Uderzo, L’Ecole des aigles, *** first in a series of Biggles-esque fighter pilot comics. When I receive my small ALCS payment each year (make sure you sign up, if you’re a writer), I like to treat myself. Last year it was a little couch for my office, and this year I bought a full set of Tanguy et Laverdure omnibuses on eBay, having never read one before. Not sure what got into me! But this one got the series off to a good start, even if the lettering was a bit hard to read at times.

On Wednesday I finished another album in French, Je n’oublie rien!, **** the first in a series of spin-offs about Thorgal’s frenemy, Kriss de Valnor. It’s pretty miserable stuff, as we see the tribulations that led to her violent life of crime, but it’s a gripping story and the art by G. De Vita always looks good. Y. Sente provides the scenario. I recently discovered that Izneo, the French answer to Comixology, is still going, and still available in the UK, despite having closed its English-language website. And what’s more, the range of albums contained in their subscription has massively increased, and now includes loads of my favourites, like Thorgal, Lucky Luke and Michel Vaillant. I'm in heaven!

On Thursday I read The Finger, ** a short set of inconsequential stories by William Burroughs from the turquoise Penguin Moderns series, about junkies, thieves and paedophiles. I went to Goodreads to give it two stars and realised that I had already done so, back in 2018. I’ve now gone through the box set and turned around all those I’ve already read, so this disaster never happens again.

On Friday it was back to the Kindle Colorsoft to listen to Counter-Measures, Series 3, **** which sadly is the last series of this Doctor Who spin-off available on Audible, and frustratingly ends on a cliffhanger, but it was all very well done. The writers of this series are Matt Fitton, John Dorney, Justin Richards and Ken Bentley. I particularly liked “The Concrete Cage”, set in an apparently haunted tower block, and “Unto the Breach”, which sends some of the team off to East Germany for a Cold War adventure. A rather fun thing I did while listening to some of this set was download a bunch of photographs of the cast, from Doctor Who and elsewhere, upload them as a “Counter-Measures” collection to Amazon Photos, and then set it as my television’s screensaver to play while the audiobook was playing. It was very satisfying when the voices happened to line up with the photos.

On Saturday I finished off a novel, Doctor Who: Jubilee by Robert Shearman. ***** Every single one of the original Doctor Who television stories has now become both a novel and an audiobook, so BBC Books have begun to cast the net wider. This book is a novelisation of an acclaimed Big Finish story, originally released on CD and then adapted as the tv episode “Rose” – which Robert Shearman also adapted as a novel. This version sees the sixth Doctor and Evelyn Smythe arrive in 2003, in an England about to celebrate the 100th jubilee of the Doctor and Evelyn defeating the Daleks, an adventure that they don’t (at first) remember. The English have kept one Dalek alive, and have used leftover Dalek technology to build an empire. I thought it was terrific, an interesting critique of the Doctor’s usual approach – to land somewhere, cause social upheaval for a day or two, then move on – and also a warning about turning dangerous stuff into jokes, lest you forget how dangerous they actually are. I hope BBC Books commission more Big Finish adaptations, because it works wonderfully well: it has the heft of a classic story but not the overfamiliarity.

On Sunday (today) I finished a silver Penguin Mini Modern, Killer in the Rain by Raymond Chandler, **** an enjoyable bit of hard-boiled crime fiction about the murder of a pornographer. That makes it 277 days of finishing a book or an audiobook every day…