MarzAat

Essay: “The Thing in the Weeds”, William Hope Hodgson, 1913.

It’s been noted that the siege plot is one Hodgson uses frequently. This is one of those stories.

This is one of Hodgson’s Sargasso Sea stories about a giant squid attacking a ship in the Sargasso Sea. It’s another story where we see a ship caught in the weed, though not the ship the story takes place on, and it’s also another story – and it’s an effective one – where Hodgson uses sounds and smell to introduce a monster and build suspense before it is actually seen. Here there is also an obscuring mist which Hodgson also uses to build mystery and suspense in a lot of his sea stories.

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