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.
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