Mushroom horror (or more properly mycological horror) has grown increasingly popular over the last few years. Shows like The Last of Us (also, first, a video game), books like Mexican Gothic by Sylvia Moreno Garcia, Sorrowland by Solomon Rivers and What Moves the Dead by T Kingfisher, graphic novels like Fruiting Bodies by Ashley Robin Franklin, or films like The Girl with All the Gifts (also, first, a book) all offer forms of fungal horror. Today’s story ‘The Voice in the Night’ by William Hope Hodgson is one of the first of the genre. Written in 1907, it’s a fairly tragic tale of a shipwrecked couple who realising they have become infected choose to stay away from anyone else to avoid infecting them. You can read the story here.
Hodgson’s story is effective in creating both pathos and terror. The initial device of the voice in the dark coming out of the mist, the desperate man who refuses the light and seems deathly afraid of coming near the ship all set up a tension and suspense which doesn’t diminish throughout the tale. Hodgson doesn’t make the mistake of completely unveiling the mystery. While we catch a brief glimpse of the man at the end of the story, our narrator is busy telling us what he can’t distinguish above what he can and ends by describing the man tentatively as ‘the thing’. The horror of the tale is often in what is gestured towards but from the narrative cringes, unwilling to describe or lay bare. The cannibalistic feast of the main character, unable to stop himself from devouring the thing he has just realised is a man made fungus monster, is gestured to briefly, shamefully, vaguely. This reticence tells a richer story than any number of words, close descriptions or artificially over-played declarations of horror. The couple’s understated acceptance of their fate, facing and bearing up under horrific circumstances, is stronger for being brushed over.
If the story is, in some ways, an interesting model of narrative reticence, its adaptation into film was not. This story is the basis for the incredibly trippy 1963 Japanese film Matango which follows a group to the mysterious fungus infected island. It manages to be just as bleak as the Hodgson tale but much more like a technicolour nightmare in execution. It’s certainly worth a watch if you can find it, although don’t expect the same tone as the story!
Romancing the Gothic 