Carnacki, The Ghost Finder

Rating:
Summary: Your goosebumps will thank you...
Review: I first read Wm. Hope Hodgson in the Ballantine fantasy reprint series edited by Lin Carter in the 1970's. Therein I discovered a brillant mind of the macabre for the first time, with his "House on the Borderland" and "The Night Land" a new master of the fantastic was given to me. I ended up back in those heady gothick days of ordering a British edition of "Carnacki, the Ghost Finder" and adoring every delicious page. Alternating between supernatural & rational explainations for the phenomena in tow, I was in ghost story heaven! A personal literary belief of mine, is that the ghost story is arguably the best expression of the elegance of the English language extant. Contained in "Carnacki" is the "The Whistling Room" my vote for the best ghost story of all time. An award I do not lightly give.

Rating:
Summary: Oh Wow! And there's more!
Review: I found the book totally engrossing and chilling. What made it even more scary for me was the fact I've studied the paranormal and have had experience in it. Some of the stories in this book were closer to the truth than a lot of people realise. There's too much detail in some stories than what could be passed as fiction. The Whistling Room is one that tells more than a work of fiction should. Same for The Hog. This book is now among my favourites. Fantastic!

Rating:
Summary: Your goosebumps will thank you...
Review: I read Carnacki years ago as a child, and loved the first mixture of the supernatural and superscience. Carnacki's use of the Electric Pentagram and other devices feels like a Gothic Quatermass. I'm thrilled that they've been published again, and have fallen in love with them all over again as an adult.

Rating:
Summary: Wow. Excellent classic gothic detective stories.
Review: I read this books first years ago, and only now remembered it is most deserving of a great review. The best description I can give of the stories of Carnacki the Ghost Finder is that he investigates stories with some great, classic gothic set-ups. He's something like a Sherlock Holmes of the supernatural, a concept I absolutely adore.

What's even better is that these stories were written by William Hope Hodgson (much admired by H. P. Lovecraft) in the early part of the 20th century (around 1910), so it still has that incredible Victorian feeling of horror, shrouded in antiquity and mystery, with a fantastic and classically spooky atmosphere. Basically, for gothic gaslight ambience, this is one of the most satisfying books you can read. Since it was actually written so long ago, it has none of the modern contrivances you find in books written today set back in that time.

There are a couple of different versions of Carnacki the Ghost Finder. One has only 5 stories, some have 6, and some have 9. I've read both the 6 story and 9 story version; obviously you should try and procure the 9 story version, which adds The Hog, The Haunted Jarvee, and The Find.

Of the stories, all of them are great reading, but my favorites are "The House Among the Laurels," one of the best haunted house short stories I've ever read, and the very Lovecraftian (though Hodgson pre-dates Lovecraft) "The Whistling Room." Other good stories include "The Gateway of the Monster" in which Carnacki bites off more than he can chew in a demonic encounter; "The Searcher of the End House," a frenetic search for the truth behind a ghost, and the unsettling "The Hog," and the nicely done atmospherics of "The Haunted Jarvee."

But the whole book is great. Check it out if you love that classic gothic atmosphere in your stories.

Rating:
Summary: finding what?
Review: mostly it turns out not to be supernatural. the first story is a beauty. the stories have lousy climaxes, built up sometimes too slow, more unnatural than mysterious.

Rating:
Summary: Discover the best
Review: So you like tales of the ghostly and supernatural, do you? Well, for the discerning and literate, true terror is much more potent than most contemporary "horror" on the discount shelves. You need to discover the collected stories of M.R. James (there's a really pricey edition out there, but there are also cheaper versions available) and Hodgson's Carnacki stories. I'll just echo the reviewer who thought "The Whistling Room" one of the best, if not the best, ghost stories of all time: One of the scariest reading moments I've ever had came at the climax of that story the first time I ever read it--and even now, years later, it can STILL produce actual physical shivers when read over again. (While I'm at it, if you like James and Hodgson, move on next to Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood. Blackwood's short stories have been collected in two relatively easy-to-find volumes.)

Rating:
Summary: Chilling
Review: William Hope Hodgson, who died in World War I as an artillery spotter exposing himself to danger, knew how to capture fear, the sheer, mind-numbing terror that can hide in the dark and the imagination. If a mad scientist on a dark and stormy night merged the essenses of Arthur Conan Doyle and Stephen King, the resulting creature would probably write stories similar to Carnacki.

Rating:
Summary: Incomplete collection
Review: Wm. Hope Hodgson's Carnacki is thematically Holmes's occultly inclined first cousin, a cerebral, driven man who faces apalling supernatural danger (and some more mundane cases) with Edwardian super-science, self-admitted utter terror, and some truly dubious mediaeval manuscripts as guides.

The stories are great and often genuinely scary despite the somewhat trite language and cardboard characterisation. But Carnacki is refreshingly honest about his fears, making his efforts to deal with the 'ab-natural' often truly heroic.

This edition is well typeset in a large face that makes it very easy to read. Unfortunately, it is missing at least two of the Carnacki stories, 'The Haunted Jarvee' and 'The Hog'. These are admittedly two of the more fantastical of the the set but they are also, in my humble opinion, two of the best ('The Whistling Room' is the third of this troika of terror), so I was disappointed to make this discovery.

I am still looking for a complete collection of Carnacki.