List of stories by William Hope Hodgson

This page contains information about the short stories of William Hope Hodgson.

The following short stories are described in separate articles.

"The Goddess of Death" was Hodgson's first published story, and appeared in 1904 in Royal Magazine.

A village is terrorized by a number of murders by strangulation, and the chief suspect is a statue of the goddess Kali stolen from a Thugee temple. The narrator is a visitor who believes there must be a rational explanation, but he finds it increasingly difficult to explain what is going on when the town's mysterious 8-foot statue is missing from its base and he sees what looks like the statue itself running through the night, carrying a cloth garotte.

Recruiting a friend to help him, the narrator leads a group to find the statue before it kills again. A volunteer is killed, but the narrator shoots at the statue, which disappears into a lake. Things look hopeless until the narrator consults the private journal of the Colonel who brought the statue from India. He learns of a secret catch in the statue's base which lowers and raises it, and which allows entry into a secret passage. Someone has been living inside the secret passage, and at its end, where the tunnel reaches the lake, he sees what appears to be another statue in the water. As he tries to pull it out, he realizes that it is an enormous "Hindoo" (Hindu) high priest wearing a white gown and a mask to imitate the statue; the bullets in fact did reach their mark and the mysterious man is dead. He was a "high priest" who had come to avenge the destruction of his temple.

This story was first published in 1907 in Blue Book Magazine. Hodgson introduces the story as follows:

Crowning the heights on the outskirts of a certain town on the east coast is a large, iron water-tank from which an isolated row of small villas obtains its supply. The top of this tank has been cemented, and round it have been placed railings, thus making it a splendid "look-out" for any of the townspeople who may choose to promenade upon it. And very popular it was until the strange and terrible happenings of which I have set out to tell.

The "strange and terrible happenings" begin with the discovery of a murder victim on the tank; he died by strangulation. The strangled man is the father of the narrator's fiancee, which leads to the narrator's involvement in the story. A local man named Dr. Tointon has been investigating; he has found that the strangled man's watch and watch chain are missing. The narrator notices that the mud around the tank is undisturbed, indicating that no one passed that way.

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