The Hodgecast Blog is Open for Business

I'm creating a separate blog specific to the Hodgecast. What is the Hodgecast, you ask? My podcast, hosted as part of the Potts House, consisting of readings of work by William Hope Hodgson. (It is possible, or even likely, that I will wind up producing other Potts House podcasts).

Hodgson was a writer of nautical adventure, horror, supernatural, and science fiction stories around 1910. His work is now out of copyright. He was a very prolific writer and was published in some of the highest-paying magazines of the day. Hodgson died tragically in World War 1, at a relatively young age, and is now largely unknown except among fans of early science fiction -- his single best-known work is a novella called The House on the Borderland. One of my goals in recording his work is to help revive interest in his work.

Earlier this year I read and made available a number of Hodgson's stories, including a couple of his Carnacki the Ghost Finder supernatural detective stories. However, I was not really satisified with the sound quality I was getting, so I have started over, and I'm serializing Hodgson's first novel The Boats of the Glen Carrig. (There is some debate about whether this novel was written first, but it was his first novel published).

The sound quality is still not as good as I would like it to be -- I am currently using an inexpensive Logitech USB headset -- but it is about as good as I can get it with the time and money I currently have available to put into the project. I do also have a BLUE Snowball USB microphone, but it is in for repair. When it gets back, if I can get it to yield good results, I may try using it instead. A painfully dull account of my troubles with the Snowball microphone can be found in the archives on my other weblog Geek Like Me Too.

The Boats of the Glen Carrig is a traditional survival and adventure story that is tinged with a little bit of supernatural horror. It is written in a somewhat archaic style, and the prose tends to move very slowly. There is no dialogue. To accentuate the eerie beauty of the prose I have mixed the reading with dark ambient music. The result will not be to everyone's tastes. The episodes are long, and the text is long-winded. But if you are patient, and like melancholy, creepy stories that build very gradually in dramatic tension, you should enjoy this project!