William Hope Hodgson

1 universe Last reviewed 2026-09-29

William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) was an English author of horror, fantasy and early science fiction, born at Blackmore End in Essex, the second of twelve children of an Anglican clergyman who moved through eleven parishes in twenty-one years. He ran away to sea at thirteen, returned to it legally as a merchant seaman's apprentice from 1891 to 1895, and drew on those years for much of his fiction, including the sea-horror novels The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" (1907) and The Ghost Pirates (1909). Short and bullied aboard ship, he took up bodybuilding, later opened a school of physical culture and was also a noted photographer of storms at sea. His visionary novels The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912), and his occult-detective stories collected as Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder (1913), were praised but sold poorly in his lifetime; his reputation grew after his death through the advocacy of H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. He married Betty Farnworth in 1913, volunteered for the Royal Field Artillery in the First World War, and was killed by an artillery shell near Ypres in April 1918.

Universe(s)

Books

• The Night Land (1912) · The Night Land Core Canon

Aggregate across all universes

• Total Core Canon books across all universes: 1 book
• Award recognitions across all universes: 0 (None recorded)

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