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.