Cephalopods Attack!

H. P. Lovecraft certainly did his bit for promoting tentacles in horror fiction. But he wasn’t the first by any stretch of the imagination. M. R. James had two in “The Treasure of Abbott Thomas” and “Count Magnus”. But two other authors spring more quickly to mind: H. G. Wells and the many Sargasso Sea stories of William Hope Hodgson.

I saw a link between these last two in a couplet of octopoid tales. The first was “The Sea Raiders” by H. G. Wells (The Weekly Sun Literary Supplement December 6, 1896). This short but brilliant tale has the sunny British resort town of Sidmouth invaded by cephalopods.

Wells begins intentionally with Science. He wants the reading to feel like this is a dull lecture on sea creatures. No menace, lots of Latin (like Haploteuthis ferox) and the sleepy sea shore. He turns on a dime when Mr. Fison, our reliable source, goes for a walk on the beach and discovers a dead human body being devoured by octopoid invaders. The man thinks he can brush the raiders aside like sea gulls but soon finds himself running for the cliffside with speedy squids in pursuit.

Wells describes them in a way that will become familiar later:

The rounded bodies fell apart as he came into sight over the ridge, and displayed the pinkish object to be the partially devoured body of a human being, but whether of a man or woman he was unable to say. And the rounded bodies were new and ghastly-looking creatures, in shape somewhat resembling an octopus, with huge and very long and flexible tentacles, coiled copiously on the ground. The skin had a glistening texture, unpleasant to see, like shiny leather. The downward bend of the tentacle-surrounded mouth, the curious excrescence at the bend, the tentacles, and the large intelligent eyes, gave the creatures a grotesque suggestion of a face. They were the size of a fair-sized swine about the body, and the tentacles seemed to him to be many feet in length. There were, he thinks, seven or eight at least of the creatures. Twenty yards beyond them, amid the surf of the now returning tide, two others were emerging from the sea.

Compare that to:

A big greyish rounded bulk, the size, perhaps, of a bear, was rising slowly and painfully out of the cylinder. As it bulged up and caught the light, it glistened like wet leather.

Two large dark-coloured eyes were regarding me steadfastly. The mass that framed them, the head of the thing, was rounded, and had, one might say, a face. There was a mouth under the eyes, the lipless brim of which quivered and panted, and dropped saliva. The whole creature heaved and pulsated convulsively. A lank tentacular appendage gripped the edge of the cylinder, another swayed in the air.

Wells uses almost the exact same diction to describe his Martians in The War of the Worlds (1898).

Now you’d think Mr. Fison would have learned we are prey and not the masters of the sea, but he goes out in a boat with three other men to try and retrieve the body. The tide has come in and there is no sign of the corpse. They do find a cluster of tentacles and start smacking the water with their oars. The Haploteuthis ferox come in numbers, soon surrounding the boat:

“Then Hill, who was a burly, powerful man, made a strenuous effort, and rose almost to a standing position. He lifted his arm, indeed, clean out of the water. Hanging to it was a complicated tangle of brown ropes; and the eyes of one of the brutes that had hold of him, glaring straight and resolute, showed momentarily above the surface. The boat heeled more and more, and the green-brown water came pouring in a cascade over the side. Then Hill slipped and fell with his ribs across the side, and his arm and the mass of tentacles about it splashed back into the water. He rolled over; his boot kicked Mr Fison’s knee as that gentleman rushed forward to seize him, and in another moment fresh tentacles had whipped about his waist and neck, and after a brief, convulsive struggle, in which the boat was nearly capsized, Hill was lugged overboard. The boat righted with a violent jerk that all but sent Mr Fison over the other side, and hid the struggle in the water from his eyes.” (“The Sea-Raiders” by H. G. Wells)

The frantic rowers make for the shore and only Fison is able to jump from the boat to safety. This fact makes him our reliable source for the tale (and a bit of a coward). After this others see where the squid went. It is reported they migrated en masse out to sea and have not been a problem since. But who knows? Perhaps the same circumstances, surmised a shortage of deep water fish, could happen again.

In this tale of 4000 words, Wells accomplishes what so many 1950s-1970s horror films will do in two hours. He sets the introduction of the monster, shows enough to get you interested but not all, then creates a situation for a longer more thorough reveal with its hero surviving, then finishing with “The End. Or is it?” style open-ended finale. Wells never wrote “The Return of the Sea Raiders” or “The Children of Sidmouth” or any such tale but he did set a pattern that would become the creature feature template. (He would do this again in longer works like The Invisible Man.)

“The Finding of the Graiken by William Hope Hodgson (The Red Magazine, February 15, 1913) appeared seventeen years later. Hodgson has a lot going on that is his own thing but this story contains a scene that reminds me so strongly of Wells’s men in the boat that it must have had some part in the telling.

Hodgson’s story is part of his Sargasso Sea saga, novels and stories set in that Atlantic morass of weeds and ruined ships that haunt our dreams. This story was one of the last of them, never being collected in his book Men of Deep Waters (1914) but was used later in Out of the Storm (1975) as well as the California edition of Weird Tales (Summer 1974), which is where I read it.

Hodgson starts his story with more background. The narrator inherits a fortune including a yacht. He invites an old friend, Ned Barlow, to join him at sea. Ned is a tortured fellow, whose fiancee disappeared with a ship called the Graiken. Once at sea, Barlow messes with the compasses but the narrator refuses to believe his friend is guilty. Barlow effects a mutiny and locks the narrator in his cabin.

The yacht sails to the Sargasso Sea. The narrator watches the weed and dead hulks of ships through the port windows of his cabin as the boat searches. Eventually they find the Graiken, stranded, its decks covered in a makeshift wall of sail cloth. Survivors walk around the deck as Ned Barlow tries to cross over to the ship on a plank. He quickly changes his mind when the devil-fish attacks him. The yachtsmen pull him on board then take the boat farther from the Graiken.

Ned Barlow is not to be kept from his bride. He cobbles together a boat for the job, with a wooden over-structure to guard them from the devil-fish. His on-the-water tank works well until:

“Then, as I gazed anxiously, from a point in the weed a little ahead of the boat there came a sudden quaking ripple that shivered through the weed in a sort of queer tremor. The next instant, like a shot from a gun, a huge mass drove up clear through the tangled weed, hurling it in all directions, and almost capsizing the boat. The creature had driven up rear foremost. It fell back with a mighty splash, and in the same moment its monstrous arms were reached out to the boat. They grasped it, enfolding themselves about it horribly. It was apparently attempting to drag the boat under.” (“The Finding of the Graiken” by William Hope Hodgson)

The story ends in a flurry. The narrator smashes his way out of his cabin, taking an elephant gun and a handful of cartridges to the deck. He tells the men to pull on the rope, bringing it up to the ship. He aims that elephant gun at one of the evil orbs of the monster and fires. Tentacles continue to attack but eventually subside. The monster will not block the way to the Graiken, where Barlow’s wife-to-be waits behind a screen of sailcloth, hung up as a barrier to the monster.

Now Hodgson wrote many variations on this scenario. In one story the fiancee has turned into a monster, in another the squidgy gets on the deck and bottlenecks the men inside the ship, in another the very ship itself is a monster. But of them all, only this one with its boat-tank seems that close to Wells. Any way you look at it, these squid tales are part of the ancestry of the squidgy beast so dear to the Cthulhu Mythos.