The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder - William Hope Hodgson

The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder by William Hope Hodgson contains a number of tales that belong to an almost forgotten genre - that of the 'club story'. The usual format of this kind of narrative is that the main character relates his experiences in the first person to an assembled group - in this case, a small dinner club - and these stories are usually tall tales of some kind. Hodgson took this rather contrived and staid format and twisted it in a number of ways, and this makes for a genuinely unsettling read. Firstly, the eponymous narrator is far from personable: he often speaks rather harshly of characters in the story, ...  Read the complete review