I listened to "The Gateway of the Monster" and it sounded rather silly. I blame the old English (who takes "by Jove" seriously?), but still, the mystery had been effective. ( )

I wasn't expecting much from these stories, but was pleasantly surprised. Although they did have an old fashioned feel to them, I found them overall entertaining and they kept my interest. It helped that they weren't just a bunch of ghost stories and some of them turned out to have at least mostly worldly explanations. I'm sure these were really ahead of their time and created a lot of buzz when they were originally published in the early 20th century. ( )

This is a set of about a dozen stand alone ghost investigations. The potential peril is mitigated somewhat because Carnacki is telling the stories so you know he at least survived the horrors. This is classic monster of the week stuff, think xfiles, shewolf of london, kolchack the night stalker. Except that only some of the hauntings are real, others are fake and some are a bit of both. Author is able to get quite a bit of variety out of this setup but i have to believe he stole most of the ghost ideas from actual local legends. I have to believe that because some of the ghosts are just so damn weird i can't imagine them being thought up by a writer of fiction :lol. ( )

"I turned-to now to fit the Electric Pentacle, setting it so that each of its 'points' and 'vales' coincided exactly with the 'points' and 'vales' of the drawn pentagram upon the floor. Then I connected up the battery, and the next instant the pale blue glare from the intertwining vacuum tubes shone out.

This book contains four of the Carnacki stories, in which he investigates reports of hauntings and demons not all of which have a supernatural explanation. He gets into some frightening situations but with his knowledge of magic and his new-fangled electric pentacle to protect him he sees off the strongest of demonic opponents.

You always know that he will prevail since the stories are narrated by one of the friends he invites for dinner after each case is concluded. The stories would be more frightening without the dinner party framing. ( )

It’s easy to mock the Carnacki tales.

They are not the first occult detective series. Hodgson seems to have created the character to cash in on the potential of a series character. The large number of magazines in 1910, when the first story was published, meant, unlike today, short fiction was usually better paying than writing novels. Carnacki was inspired by the success of Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence stories, another occult detective series.

Carnacki’s tools seem somewhat ludicrous, even for the time. There’s a heavy patina of pseudoscience what with the occult significance of various colors and Carnacki’s famous Electric Pentacle, essentially a string of colored lights for magical defense.

The otherworldy is often signified by strings of repeated vowels: Carnacki’s go-to reference the Sigsand Manuscript and its Saaamaaa Ritual, the Incantation of Raaaeee, and the Aeiirii “forms of materialization”.

Yet the stories work.

A lot of that, as editor Davies notes in his concise and useful introduction, is that the nine stories are not formulaic. The solutions to the mysteries Carnacki is called into investigate are sometimes supernatural, sometimes involve human actions, and sometimes a combination of both. One story, “The Find”, doesn’t even have a hint of the occult or supernatural about it since Carnacki investigates the improdn bable appearance of a second copy of a very rare book.

There is a general formula to the stories. Each story has Carnacki relating his latest adventure in his house at 472 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea on London’s Embankment to his friends Jessop, Arkright, Taylor and the narrator Dodgson. At the end of each story, Carnacki kicks them out with some variation of “Out you go.”

Carnacki approaches all his investigations with the assumption human beings are behind the mysteries. Often that involves days, sometimes weeks, long investigation of buildings and, in “The Haunted Jarvee”, a ship. Carnacki makes heavy use of photography in his investigations, and Hodgson, before he turned to writing, was a keen photographer himself, sometimes lecturing on the subject. He frequently packs a revolver too, at one point contemplating shooting himself and another man to keep their souls away from malevolent forces from the “Outer Circle” in “The Hog”. That’s the longest Carnacki tale and another example of a weird, porcine menaces in Hodgson’s writings. It’s also the one where he develops his own cosmic mythology the most.

The occult mysteries are varied. A tale from Carnacki’s younger days, “The Searcher of the End House”, has the house where he lives with his mother seemingly haunted. A butler is stabbed by inhuman forces in “The Thing Invisible”. “The Gateway of the Monster”, “The House among the Laurels”, and “The Whistling Room” are all haunted house investigations. A spectral horse and a curse are the subjects of “The Horse of the Invisible”.

As Davies notes, to give too much away about these stories with plot summaries would take away the pleasure of Carnacki’s investigations and revelations.

Carnacki is an engaging narrator. He uses jaunty Edwardian slang. He’s not afraid to admit when he loses his nerve or bolts from the scene. After offering some explanation of events, he flatters his friends and the reader by often asking “Do you understand?” though I didn’t always. He’s perfectly willing to say when he doesn’t really have a complete explanation.

And, as John Linwood Grant has noted, all the technology and action of the Carnacki tales makes them much more readable than Blackwood’s John Silence series.

So spending time with the 174 pages of the Carnacki stories wasn’t boring or painful at all, so I’d recommend them if you’ve ever been curious about them. ( )