"A Succubus for Remembrance" excerpts - Ways to Break a Good Man, #1

Last Halloween I posted a story called "Ways to Break a Good Man, No.2".  A few people asked where the hell is "Ways to Break a Good Man, No.1"?  In truth there was an original "Ways to Break a Good Man, #1" story involving my succubus-wielding mob boss, Koontz, and a dangerous game for a 'good man' Governor's soul.  I liked the idea and it had a really effective horror scene early on, but the story kept petering out in a mess of convoluted dialogue (One character realised they needed to stall for time and I made them so good at it they kept filibustering the story into oblivion).  I've finally straightened that story out and it will be present in the forthcoming collection, A Succubus for Remembrance.  Here's an excerpt to whet the appetite:

* * * *

“My people are turning this hotel upside down as we speak,” King said, trying to regain composure, authority.  “They will find me.  And you.”

“Tut tut, Governor King.  You didn’t think Ceptophthorié was the only demon I have working for me . . .”  The fat man grinned like a toad before turning away.  “Enjoy your time with Ceptophthorié.  She’ll give your fall a soft landing.”

He tittered as he left the room.

That left King alone . . . with the demon.  He sat up on the bed and his gaze flicked back and forth between her and the lamp sitting on the bedside table.  He was ready to pick it up and hurl it at her should she make an aggressive move in his direction.

The girl didn’t move.  She sat on her chair and her full lips curled up in amusement.

“You look very tense.  Would you like me to give you a massage?” she asked.

“No thanks.”  King’s gaze flicked back and forth between her and the lamp.  “I’m not going to let you do to me whatever you did to McMillan.”

“That’s not how it works,” Ceptophthorié said.  “You have to do me.”

King’s brow furrowed.

“Like McMillan,” Ceptophthorié said.  “He shoved his big prick inside me and filled my gorgeous pussy with his cum.  Then I made him into my little toy.  Those are the rules—the man must instigate sexual intercourse of his own free choice.”

“Then I won’t,” King said.

“No?” Ceptophthorié arched a pencil-thin eyebrow.

“No,” King said, his voice flecked with ice.  “I have a wife and daughter I love very much.  I’m not interested in a common whore.”

Ceptophthorié smiled at his insult.

“I could make you,” she said.  “I could use my magic to pin you to the bed, climb on top, swallow up that gorgeous prick with my luscious pussy and ride you until you melted inside me.  Or I could entangle you in a web of seduction so potent the merest pluck of a thread would bring you to me on your knees like a faithful little dog.”

For a moment King felt that oppressive force of her presence wrapped around him like a velvet glove.  He feared her words were no idle boasts.

“Do it,” he challenged.

Ceptophthorié smiled.  “Where would be the sport in that?  There’s no fun in taking a man as if he were a common beast.  It’s not what I want.”

“What do you want?” King asked.  The more he kept her talking the more time it gave the others to find him.

“I want to play a game,” she said.  “Would you like to play a game with me?” she asked with a coquettish expression of wide-eyed innocence.

“What if I say no?” King asked.  “What’s to stop me walking out of that door right now?”

Ceptophthorié pushed her lower lip out in a disappointed pout.

“That would upset me.  I don’t like it when my games are spoiled.  And when I’m upset I take it out on the loved ones of the person who upset me.  McMillan is not my only toy.  Would you like your wife and daughter brutally gang-raped?”

The furious intensity of King’s glare was broken as he stared into the demon’s burning red eyes and realized she wasn’t bluffing.  It felt like ice-cold water poured down his spine.

“Now for the rules of the game.”  Ceptophthorié switched back to coquettish playfulness.  “It’s a challenge—your resolve versus my erotic temptations.  At sunrise I must depart this plane.  If you can resist my seductions until then you win and get to keep your soul.  I’ll even make it easier.  I won’t use my demonic abilities to entrance or otherwise compel you into having sexual intercourse with me.  I won’t even touch you . . .”

The corner of her full lips turned up in a suggestive smile.

“. . . unless you ask me to.  How does that sound?”

“It sounds very easy.  I don’t want to have sex with you.”

“Really?” Ceptophthorié said with a teasing smile.  “It seems your body has other ideas.”  She glanced at the obvious erection tenting the front of his underwear.  “He seems eager to greet me, to feel the warmth of my flesh wrapped around him.”

King reddened and shielded the embarrassing protrusion with his hands.  It was an automatic response, that was all.

Ceptophthorié giggled.

“If I decide to play, what guarantee is there that you’ll stick to the rules?” King asked.  “If your . . . demonic—”

It still felt wrong to use the word even though he’d accepted the impossibility of what she was.

“—abilities are as powerful as you claim, what’s to stop you using them once it gets close to sunrise and I’m about to win?”

“My word,” Ceptophthorié said.

King snorted.  “You’re a demon.”

Ceptophthorié was about to feign an expression of hurt, but laughed instead.  “True,” she admitted.  “I won’t cheat though.  The game has no challenge if I allow myself to break the rules whenever the game doesn’t go my way.”

She fixed her gaze on King, temporarily casting aside her flirtatious mask.

“I want to see you fall.  I want you to feel the wind flutter through your hair as you plummet into my abyss and know it was you that jumped.  That is true pleasure.”

She closed her eyes, brought her hands up and lewdly squeezed the swollen mounds of her breasts.

“It won’t happen,” King said.  “You made a mistake.  You showed me McMillan.  Do you think I’d be stupid enough to fuck you after I saw what it did to McMillan?”

Ceptophthorié threw back her head and laughed.

“I always show the men the consequences of their own damnation.  It makes the game so much more interesting.”

The succubus made no move towards King.  He watched her warily.  At least it started that way.  His gaze dipped downwards and was pulled in by the lush, swollen hemispheres of her breasts.  It orbited her fleshy curves, trapped like a ship caught in a black hole, sucked down, tugged into the shadowy cleft of cleavage while he became aware of the steady beat of blood through his temples.  Down his gaze fell, sliding down a flat belly to the beginnings of her short skirt.  She uncrossed her legs and he glimpsed the gates to her sex—plump, dewy, welcoming.  His vision narrowed until it seemed like the shadowy pink cleft between her legs grew to encompass his entire world.  It was like he stood on the edge of the hotel roof, staring at something far below, staring then teetering, teetering then falling.  He was falling down into a fleshy canyon and the soft pink folds of her sex were opening to accept him, opening to engulf him.

* * * *

I suspect this game will be a little harder than Governor King first thought.  A Succubus for Remembrance, out November.

A Succubus for Remembrance Excerpts - Hugh the Hero

The holiday back home with the folks has been unsurprisingly chaotic.  I'm still endeavouring to get A Succubus for Remembrance ready for an early November release, although this might slip - I'd rather put out a good book two weeks late than an on-time book filled with embarrassing errors.  In the meantime here's an excerpt from one of the new stories, "Hugh the Hero."  This is the parallel-quel story to "Trent the Traitor."  You'll recognise the opening scene in the excerpt, although this time it's from Hugh's perspective.

* * * *

They paused outside a large ornate door.  Hugh saw a face he recognized walking in the opposite direction with an accompaniment of succubus guards.  One of the lower-ranked infantry grunts.  He’d seen him a few times in the main mess tent at Helmuth.  Weaselly-looking dude.

“Hang in there,” he bellowed.  “Don’t let them break you.  The marines will come.  They’ll bust us all out of this hellhole.”

Hugh truly believed that.  He believed in supreme American military might.  The unusual H-space physics and unorthodox hindig tactics had caught them off guard, but they would find a way to adapt and then they’d flatten this little shitball just as easily as they’d steamrollered over Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and all the other fucktards.

 “Pray to Jesus!” he shouted.  “Keep your faith in...”

Hugh’s words tailed off.  Why wasn’t this guy in chains?  Why did he look more like a VIP with an escort detail than a prisoner with guards?

An awful thought germinated in Hugh’s mind.  The attack on Helmuth had been too easy.  Even with their unorthodox tactics the devils should not have been able to penetrate their outer defenses and surprise them like that.

Unless they’d had inside help.

“You sold us out.”

Rage exploded within Hugh.  This asshole hadn’t just sold out his side, he’d sold out his country, his species, his world, God.  For what, a piece of demonic tail?

“You motherfucker.  You sold us out.  That’s how they got in so easily.  You sold us out for a piece of ass.  You traitorous fuck.  I’ll tear your fucking lungs out.”

Thoughts of waiting patiently for the right opportunity were incinerated in the incandescent blaze of Hugh’s righteous rage.  Right then, at that moment, he cared about nothing other than putting his hands around that fucker’s scrawny throat and squeezing until the asshole’s eyes popped out.

The bubblegum-skinned demon girls giggled and opened the big ornate door.

Hugh tensed his muscular frame to pounce and...

...was suddenly travelling backwards in the opposite direction.  He felt a constriction around his waist and looked down to see pink tentacle as thick as his thigh wrapped around his midriff.  It was fantastically strong.  Hugh was lifted up off the floor and dragged through the open door and down into darkness.  One of the succubi gave him a little wave as she closed the heavy door behind him.

Hugh’s struggling form was dumped onto a floor that was underneath an inch of what he initially thought was water.  The substance was wet, but as he moved his hands through it he realized it was too viscous to be water.  It felt more like warm slime.  The floor didn’t feel much like a floor either.  It yielded beneath his weight and felt more like a trampoline, or the surface to a waterbed.

Unsteadily he got back to his feet, wobbling on the yielding and slippery floor.  Initially the room seemed to be in darkness, but as his eyes accustomed he saw the slime beneath him was mildly phosphorescent.  It wasn’t as bright as the corridor outside, but his eyes were able to adjust and see—

Oh Mary-fucking-mother of God.

Most of the hindigs looked like the typical devil girls of computer games.  Some were weirder—he’d heard of floating jellyfish girls; strange plant hybrids; girls that were half spider; and he’d glimpsed the giant fog puffers that had overwhelmed FOB Helmuth.  The hindig before him was half octopus or squid.  From the waist up she had the voluptuous body of a porn queen.  There was a regal cast to her face as well.  Hugh might have thought it beautiful if it wasn’t for the unnatural bubble-gum hue to her skin, or her yellow eyes.  She didn’t have hair either.  At first he’d thought it contained within a pink sack hanging behind her head.  Then he realized that sack was part of her body.  He watched it swell up and down as if it was breathing.

That part, her upper half, Hugh could just about deal with.  It was her lower half that nearly tore his mind asunder.  His disintegrating sanity tried to tell him it was a ball gown—a giant, elaborate, puffed up ballroom dress, like a princess might wear in a Disney cartoon.  One that was so huge she needed to stand on stilts to wear it.

He wasn’t yet insane enough to be fooled.  It was a ring of pink tentacles, each as thick as his thigh.  They bulged out of her waist and curled down to the ground.  Hugh saw it clearly even though he knew it should not be.

“Welcome,” the demon said in a surprisingly melodious voice.  “I am Enteroctia.”

* * * *

And that's a little more of Hugh's eventual fate revealed.  For the rest you'll have to wait until the new collection comes out next month.

There is also a line in this story that should hit like a slap in the face.  Don't worry, I love you all really... ;)

A first preview for "A Succubus for Remembrance"

In an ideal world this would be where I show off a cool new cover and a coming soon link.  As I normally write in a state of complete chaos those aren't ready yet.  It also didn't help that the last few stories ended up being 10,000+ word monsters and a couple needed full rewrites.  In the meantime, while I'm trying to get my shit together, here's a peek at the contents list:

1. A Succubus for Remembrance
2. The Skinning Knife
3. Vernon the Volunteer
4. Trent the Traitor
5. Hugh the Hero
6. Slugjob
7. Iron Girders and Steel Springs
8. Ways to Break a Good Man, #1
9. Ways to Break a Good Man, No.2
10. Ways to Break a Good Man, 3
11. Vampiric Boobies
12. Streetwalking with a Succubus
13. Nazi vs. Succubus

Some of those will be familiar, but not as many as with previous collections.  This time over half will be brand new stories making their first appearance with this collection.  These are also some of the longest stories I've written.  This time I built the running order from my ideas file and then wrote the stories afterwards.  I wouldn't recommend this approach to any budding writers as you end up with a 90K monster instead of the more sensible 70K words it should be! :D

The list isn't 100% finalized.  "Nazi vs. Succubus" was supposed to be a succubus-themed parody of the Ilsa nazisploitation films.  I let horror-head out of his cage for that one and he ended up rampaging off into some very dark and disturbing territory.  I'll have to run that one past the folks at eXcessica to make sure it doesn't cross the line.

Overall A Succubus for Remembrance might be a little darker and more monstery than my other collections.  Perversely, it also has my highest number of happy-ish endings so far.  Some questions are answered - such as what did happen to Hugh in "Trent the Traitor" and you'll also get to see "Ways to Break a Good Man, #1" after I confused everyone with the title "Ways to Break a Good Man, No.2" last Halloween.  More of the devious witch Annette Brite's background will be revealed, the hell-space campaign continues to worsen, and I add Octopus Girl/Scylla to the list of monster girls I've written stories about.

Provisionally, the collection should be out early November, although there is a chance the date might slip (Chaos writing, sorry).  I'll be giving out further details in the coming weeks as well as excerpts from the new stories.

Literotica's 2013 Halloween Story Contest: Nicole needs your votes!

Ok, I need your votes.

Literotica has started its 2013 Halloween Story Contest.

Here's my entrant, a sexy little succubus tale featuring Nicole:
Streetwalking with a Succubus.

This time I thought I'd put a serious entrant in rather than trying to ambush nonhuman-romance fans with a gruesome horror tale.  If you like it, please show your appreciation by voting.

I talked about Literotica contests before.  They have quirks.  Because of the way the scoring works, anything other than the maximum '5' is strictly worse than no vote at all.  While a '4' might look like a helpful vote, it's actually a bullet through the head for a story's chances.  Also, the site owners are pretty good at detecting skullduggery.  Multiple votes and votes trashing an opponent's story are filtered out.

While I'd like to place (oddly, given what I write about, I've never placed in Literotica's Halloween contest), mostly I hope people enjoy the story.  I do write lighter and fluffier succubus tales from time to time.

If you like my darker stuff, never fear.  I've been sitting on a little stockpile.  More will be revealed on that over the coming month. ;)

Think of this tale as a little preview of goodies to come...

Hentai Game Review - Violated Fantasy (Okasare Fantasy)

I mentioned Violated Fantasy (Okasare Fantasy) back here in a little hentai game roundup.  It’s the follow-up to Violated Quest.  I finally got around to picking it up last weekend and was pleasantly surprised.

Like its predecessor, Violated Fantasy is one of those RPGMaker clones.  Also like its predecessor it does away with the whole tedious grindy random encounter stuff.  Unlike its predecessor it has more of a plot as well as winnable battles and levelling.

The plot has you kidnapped by the demon queen ruler of a fantasy world.  She wants to do the naughty with you but is worried her succubus powers will blast your brain out of your ears and bring the sex to a quick and messy end.  To toughen you up she sends you out into a world full of over-amorous monster girls in order to build up your sexual resistance.  To prevent the over-amorous monster girls from fucking you to death/slavery/etc., she equips you with a magical collar that yanks you out of the fight the moment you lose.

I don't think she's taking 'No' as an answer.

The collar is a nice touch.  I know some people like the sexy fights in games like Monster Girl Quest, but get turned off by the Bad Ends where Luka gets digested, sucked dry, etc.  This game might be more to their liking.  To people that like the Bad Ends, don’t worry, there’s a point near the end where the collar is removed and you’re free to send your protagonist off to any doomed end you desire.

I liked how they handled the fights.  Normally in these games, if you want to see the good stuff you have to throw the fight and lose.  Violated Fantasy is a little different.  Each monster girl has multiple attacks (each with their own CG).  You unlock them by knocking off more of their health/energy bar in the fight.  Want to see more – win the fight.  It’s a simple but effective little tweak from a game design perspective as it rewards the player for trying to win while still allowing the monster girl to be sexually dominant.  I wouldn’t be surprised if other games copy this – it allows the game to flow more naturally than: lose, watch Bad End, game over, reload.

Again they’ve been generous with the enemies with 52 encounters (although 7 of those are with the demon queen at different stages).  The artwork is variable, but mostly fine.  I liked the work of the artist who did the goblin, boar girl, nymph, etc....

Nymph - Yes

 ...while the crazed cartoon lolis didn’t really do anything for me.

Frog Girl-Thing - Um...no.

That’s standard for this type of game.  They’re aiming to hit a wide variety of kinks, some of which are a little weird.  I don’t think I’ve seen a Sea Urchin girl used before.

Sea Urchin Girl - Ouchies!

Her scene looks a little...uncomfortable.

The one big flaw with the game is the levelling up math.  It went a little haywire for me.  For a game with no random grinding (although you can fight the same monster girl multiple times for extra experience) I’d have expected it to be about fighting the girls in the right order with the difficulty spiking if you happen to miss one.  What actually happened was I found my fighting (technically resisting) ability vastly outstripping the power of the enemies.  By the third area I’d hit some kind of quasi-god status.  By the fourth area it was a struggle not to kill most enemies with one or two hits of the most basic attack (and miss some of their attack CGs in the process).  This meant that all the extra skills and items they’d added to the game seemed superfluous.  I never figured out what most of them did and didn’t need to.

Also, as with the first game, if you’re using AGTH you’ll want to add the H-code /HBN*0@470D5A to unscramble the text before translation.  (Oh, and as I sometimes neglect to mention this part – the game is in Japanese.  You’ll need to set your locale to Japanese and use a text hooker + machine translator to convert to – sometimes garbled! – English.  Back here I posted some links to helpful guides on how to set this up.)

Overall, it’s not as detailed as Monster Girl Quest, or as pretty as Violated Hero, but if you’ve exhausted the scenes in those and want to try something new, this is worth a look, if you’re willing to overlook the slightly shonky JRPG math.

And finally the obligatory plug.  If you like games like this, you’ll also like my books.

#52Books - July

September seems to have a bookish theme on the blog.  Don't worry, I don't believe in boring books - I like mine filled with sex and violence... ;)

#17: William Hope Hodgson – The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’

This is a real oldie, being first published in 1907.  You can pick it up for free from the Gutenberg Project here.  Most people associate weird tentacle horror with HP Lovecraft, but Hodgson predates him.  This is a weird horror tale concerning the adventures of a group of seamen after their boat sinks and their lifeboats encounter strange islands and an eerie weed continent.  The book was written over a century ago and the prose features a lot of quirks.  For starters there are no dialogue tags.  The entire book is written as an account of the narrator’s adventures.  Despite this I didn’t have any problems with the pacing and found it an enjoyable, if old-fashioned, yarn.

If you’ve devoured all of Lovecraft’s works and fancy something in the same vein, The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ might be worth a look.  Hodgson has a similar flair for weird horror.  The weakness he has compared to Lovecraft is there is no over-arching mythos underpinning the work and it lacks the cosmic bleakness of Lovecraft’s stories—it’s more of a romantic adventure in a very odd setting.  The story is effectively eerie and creepy in places and worth reading for fans of old weird horror.

#18: Wrath James White: To The Death

Zombies meet MMA cage fighting in a satisfyingly brutal book from Wrath James White.  The default setting for the ever-popular brain munchers is zombie apocalypse, so it’s refreshing to read a book where the apocalypse sort of fizzles out and never materialises (there’s a minor subplot where an African warlord uses them as an army and fails).  The real focus of White’s book is to put an MMA fighter in a cage with a zombie and describe the messy results in graphic detail.  Being a former fighter himself allows White to bring a degree of verisimilitude to the brutal and pulpy fights.

And it is a pulp story—there are evil mob bosses, cops and a hard-up fighter trying to win his last lucrative fight and get out with the money before the authorities shut everything down.  Tyler Pope is the fighter, and waiting for him in the cage is the monstrous Lester Broad (I’m guessing an expy of the real-life Brock Lesner), a recently-deceased former professional wrestler, former MMA champion, and now returned as a hulking, two-hundred-and-eighty-pound, ravenous-for-human-flesh zombie.

The editing is a little sloppy, but thankfully this doesn’t detract too much as White’s entertaining slice of gore-noir zips along at breakneck pace.  I thought White might have missed a trick with the ending though.  One of the characters would have made a good foil to his recurring main villain, Vlad, in future books, but alas, a round two is not to be.

#19: Cameron Pierce – Ass Goblins of Auschwitz

My experience of Bizarro fiction thus far appears to be this:

Books written by Carlton Mellick III == good.

Books not written by Carlton Mellick III == meh.

This book was not written by Carlton Mellick III.

Pierce’s sophomore effort is a tricky book to write about.  It’s set in a suitably bizarro universe where nazi-themed ass goblins (asses on legs with eye stalks emerging out of the butt cheeks) abduct kids from Kidland and take them to Auschwitz to make toys out of children’s body parts.  Pierce has a fantastically loopy imagination and a flair for describing the gross and perverse.

The book didn’t really hit the spot for me.  Pierce is going hell-for-leather for total offensiveness and gross-out description, which is great to see, but the characters were too detached from reality for me to really care about the varied and highly imaginative indignities Pierce heaps upon them.

#20: Shane McKenzie – Bleed On Me

Fasten the seatbelts, this one is high-octane gore fuel.  Deadbeat slacker, Chris Taylor, goes down to complain about the noise his gangbanger neighbours are making and finds himself in the middle of a massacre.  The new drug they stole and tried out has the unfortunate side effect of opening up the body to demon possession.  And by possession I mean rip the body apart and reshape it in new and imaginative forms of body horror.

The book is short, fast and completely drenched in gore.  There’s barely a chance to pause for breath as Chris is pursued by twisted demons.  It would make a great action-packed horror film.  There are some weaknesses—McKenzie could have filled in some more of the background, in particular why a character’s blood does what it does—but overall the book is fun, fast-paced and perfect for gore lovers.

Japanese Mushroom People and Ghost Ships: The story of how I rediscovered William Hope Hodgson

I was a voracious reader as a child.  My school had a small library and I devoured all the horror, fantasy and science fiction I could find.  I loved (and still love) scary short story collections.  There were two stories I remember as really scaring the bejeebers out of me.

The first featured a remote part of rural America being slowly corrupted by a blight that came from a meteorite.  This blight took the form of a strange colour and caused plants and animals to grow in bizarre and horrifying ways.  I remember the plight of the hapless farming family, unable to leave despite knowing the colour is slowly consuming them from the inside.  The ending is unsettling as well.  On one hand it seems like it’s over—having eaten its fill, the colour shoots back off into space—but on the other the narrator reports seeing a residue still present at the bottom of the well.  Worse, the whole area is going to be flooded and turned into a reservoir, potentially spreading the contamination further.  For a child used to ghost stories with nice neat endings, an ending that implies it might not be over, that it might, in fact, get much much worse, gave me shivers.

Most horror aficionados will immediately recognise that as HP Lovecraft’s classic: “The Colour out of Space.”  I didn’t know who Lovecraft was at the time, but when I bumped into his work—and the Cthulhu mythos—again later, it was no great surprise to learn he was the writer responsible for a story that had left a mark on me.

The second story was about a group of sailors that found a queer abandoned boat.  The boat is floating in a patch of scum and covered all over in strange fungal growth.  As the sailors climb aboard, the sense of something being wrong deepens.  Below the decks they think they hear what sounds like the pumping of a great heart.  Then the fungus starts to move.  One man is gruesomely consumed and the others barely escape with their lives.  Worse, this is not a story that ends with the monster meeting a final and fiery end.  The narrator ends his story and the reader is left with the knowledge that the fungal ship is still out there.

Trying to identify this story was more of a puzzle.  Sadly, back then I was too young and stupid to actually pay attention to the names of the writers who provided me with these wondrous stories.  Or in this case even the title.  I knew it was a story about a creepy boat covered in man-eating fungus, but as I couldn’t remember either the writer or title, and had not come across it since, I figured this was going to be one of those pieces of nostalgia forever lost to the mists of time.

And so time passed...

Recently I watched the cult Japanese film “Matango.”  Fans of Kenkou Cross’s Monster Girl Encyclopedia will recognise that name.  It’s used for this entry:

No, not that Matango...

I don’t know if KC took the name from the film or both have the same roots in Japanese mythology.  (On a tangential note, Alraune, another frequently appearing monster girl, comes from German myth, and the Hanns Heinz Ewers novel of the same name has also spawned a few films)

Matango is an odd 1963 Japanese film where a bunch of characters get ship-wrecked on an island.  The interior of the island contains lots of strange mushrooms and they find the wreck of a research boat covered in strange fungal growth.  They avoid eating the mushrooms at first, but then food supplies run low and the horror kicks in when they discover eating the mushrooms turns you into a mushroom person (with appropriately icky slow transformation)

So far so Japanese.

Except it isn’t.  The plot is based on the short story “The Voice in the Night”, written by the English writer William Hope Hodgson.

“...boat covered in strange fungal growth.”  Could this be the mystery author of the mystery story that scared the bejeebers out of me as a child?

And indeed it is.  After a little digging through Hodgson’s bibliography and the wonders of out-of-copyright work being made available on the internet, I was able to rediscover “The Derelict.”

You can read it here.

“All about him the mould was in active movement. His feet had sunk out of sight. The stuff appeared to be lapping at his legs and abruptly his bare flesh showed. The hideous stuff had rent his trouser-leg away as if it were paper. He gave out a simply sickening scream, and, with a vast effort, wrenched one leg free. It was partly destroyed. The next instant he pitched face downward, and the stuff heaped itself upon him, as if it were actually alive, with a dreadful, severe life. It was simply infernal. The man had gone from sight. Where he had fallen was now a writhing, elongated mound, in constant and horrible increase, as the mould appeared to move towards it in strange ripples from all sides.”

Brrr.  Yep, still as creepy as I remember.

Hodgson came before HP Lovecraft and while his work lacks the core cosmic bleakness saturating Lovecraft’s works, he’s worth checking out if you like old weird horror.  His books can be found for free at the Gutenberg project here.  He also created the supernatural detective Thomas Carnacki.

And that, through a rather convoluted path, is how I rediscovered the stories of William Hope Hodgson, a writer who scared the bejeebers out of me as a child.