Carnacki the Ghost-Finder & The Hog, Explained: A Detailed Summary and a Literary Analysis
Updated: Aug 13
Swine feature prominently in William Hope Hodgson’s fiction. Sometimes they are antagonists outright; at other times they are instruments of the plot or used to describe the attributes of Hodgson’s horrors. Put more simply, they are either monsters, victims of monsters, or metaphors for monsters. This is most prominently featured in The House on the Borderland, where a lonely man is besieged by porcine demons after his house is accidentally built upon a weak spot in the fabric between the natural and supernatural worlds.
Those devilish swine are remarkably similar in form, character, and motive to the porkers that haunt Carnacki’s client in “The Hog.” The story is also something of a reworking of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Green Tea,” a supernatural mystery featuring Carnacki’s literary ancestor, the occult specialist Dr. Hesselius. In Le Fanu’s story, Hesselius is consulted by a troubled minister who is being persecuted by the apparition of a black monkey—a hateful, tyrannical presence seemingly intent upon driving its victim to suicide.
Like Carnacki, Hesselius is an old hand at occult phenomena and has a tendency to surround his investigations with elaborate pseudo-scientific theories. Hesselius suspects that his client’s excessive consumption of green tea, which he uses to remain awake while obsessively reading from his occult library, has weakened the man’s psychic defenses and opened him to supernatural influences. The result is Le Fanu’s own variation on the theme that Hodgson develops here: an ordinary human being becomes the unwilling battleground between the civilized self and something dark, alien, and bestial.
II.
Le Fanu’s frenzied monkey is similar, symbolically, to Hodgson’s slovenly hog. Both animals have a close kinship to mankind, but each represents a different aspect of our darker nature. Monkeys are vain, impulsive, violent, libidinous, despotic, and delusional; they can symbolize mankind’s self-importance and the foolishness of our intelligence. Hogs, on the other hand, have long represented our basest and most shameful appetites: stupidity, herd mentality, self-indulgence, corpulence, lack of hygiene, gluttony, rage, fear, greed, envy, lust, and arrogance.
They appear as caricatures of human appetite and ignorance in stories such as “The Three Little Pigs” and Animal Farm, and their association with demonic possession is particularly old. In the Gospels, Christ casts “Legion”—the multitude of demons possessing the Gerasene madman—into a herd of swine, which the
n rushes collectively into the sea. Hodgson’s use of the animal is especially appropriate to the strange territory occupied by the Carnacki stories.
Thomas Carnacki is neither a conventional detective nor a conventional occultist. He approaches supernatural phenomena with the equipment and vocabulary of an Edwardian laboratory: electrical apparatus, photographic experiments, elaborate theories, and defensive devices coexist with ancient manuscripts, magical formulae, and occult lore. Hodgson repeatedly refuses to decide whether these phenomena are genuinely supernatural or merely manifestations of obscure forces that science has not yet learned to understand. The effect is one of scientific rationalism pushed right up against the edge of the unknowable.
III.
Like Le Fanu’s monkey, Hodgson’s porkers are deeply symbolic—especially to Hodgson himself. He was intensely concerned with cleanliness, physical discipline, and self-control, and he seems to have regarded the pig as the natural antithesis of these virtues. Swine represented everything he tried to suppress or avoid: filth, appetite, disorder, sensuality, and the surrender of disciplined human will to animal instinct. Hodgson had encountered pigs during his years at sea, when they were sometimes carried as shipboard cargo, giving the imagery a particularly concrete association for him.
“The Hog” is therefore a story of possession, but it is also a story about the terrifying fragility of the boundary between the human and the inhuman. Its supernatural cosmology is unusually elaborate even by Hodgson’s standards, and the story has often been regarded as the greatest of the Carnacki cases. Brian Stableford called it “by far the best” of the Carnacki stories, praising its vision of a metaphysical realm “dark and hostile,” inhabited by degraded entities whose porcine characteristics mock human ambition.
It is worth remembering, too, that the Hog is not necessarily a literal giant pig from some supernatural bestiary. The swine-like appearance is part of the way these entities manifest themselves to human perception. What Carnacki encounters is something much larger and stranger: an alien force whose nature seems to exist beyond the ordinary boundaries of physical reality.
IV.
In this respect, “The Hog” moves closer than most of the Carnacki tales to the cosmic horror of The House on the Borderland. The familiar Holmesian confidence of the ghost-finder begins to give way to something more unsettling: the realization that intelligence, courage, technology, and even occult knowledge may not be enough to make mankind master of the universe.
For Carnacki, this is a particularly terrible possibility. His greatest strength is his confidence in preparation, knowledge, and self-control. Here, however, he confronts a force that seems almost tailor-made to undermine those virtues. The result is one of Hodgson’s strangest and most nightmarish stories—and one in which the old ghost-finder comes closer than ever before to discovering just how small a man can be in the presence of the unknown.
SUMMARY
Carnacki gathers his friends, as usually, to tell them another story about his most recent adventure beside the snapping fireside of his London study after a rich meal washed down with port. Amid the cigar smoke, he tells of his latest client, a man named Bains whom he fears may have a breach in the metaphysical barrier which usually protects humans from the intrusions of the “Outer Monstrosities.” Bains has been suffering from terrifying lucid dreams that have disturbed him for months. He finds himself in a “deep, vague place” with shadowy threats lurking on all sides in the dark.
He instinctively knows that it is a bad place which he must escape at all hazards, and struggles to regain consciousness before the great threat that he senses awaiting him can lunge out. He manages to force himself back awake, but finds himself experiencing what we would call sleep paralysis: his body is immobile and although he can see the mortal world, his dreaming world seems to have burst in on his waking world, and as he lies there in terror, he is aware of distant sounds of a gigantic swine squealing and grunting. He finally manages to get up and fully awaken, but he is constantly haunted by the random screams of a frantic hog. What is it? Why is it coming for him? What can be done?
Carnacki prepares his strategy of attack and Bains agrees to be completely submissive to Carnacki, creating an unwavering power structure between them (which will quickly prove suspiciously erotic). Committed to their course of action, they begin to set up Carnacki’s Tesla-esque paranormal machinery in the room where they will conduct their first experiment. The main apparatus is his spectrum defense – seven concentric rings made of neon tubes which range in color from red, orange, and yellow, to green, blue, indigo, and violet – essentially a rainbow-colored ring of neon light. The extreme ends of the color spectrum – red and violet – attract the most powerful, most evil entities, whereas blue – the median – attracts positive supernatural powers. Carnacki will attempt to lure Bains’ demon out of hiding – to identify and target it for destruction – with the outer, flame-colored lights, while relying on the cooler colors on the inside to act as a defensive fence.
***
As they prepare the begin the experiment, Bains shamefully shares with Carnacki some new information: not only has he been hearing the swinish grunts, but he himself has been squealing like a pig in response to them. Carnacki is disturbed by the implication he reads into this, but they proceed by donning rubber suits and helmets and having Bains lie down on a low table with glass legs set in the center of the neon rings. Carnacki plugs electrodes into Bains’ helmet and asks him to do two things: focus his thoughts on the sound of the squealing hogs, and stay awake at all hazards – he is to replicate his sleeping conditions without actually falling unconscious.
Like any great paranormal detective, Carnacki sets about using a camera and phonograph recorder to try to capture spectral sights and sounds, and he is soon able to record the vague sounds of a swarm of squealing pigs regularly peppered by the monstrous grunts of what sounds to be an inconceivably gigantic hog. The intensity of the sounds is more powerful than Carnacki expected, and furthermore, he is horrified to note a growing shadow spreading beneath Bains’ table in spite of the piercing neon light and lack of obstructions. Carnacki commands Bains to stop focusing on the sounds so intently, but it is too late: Bains has fallen asleep.
Bains’ eyes are peeled open – agape in unconscious terror – and he begins grunting and squealing with piggish glee. The shadow grows, darkens, and deepens, and the two men begin to sink into what appears to be the mouth of this otherworldly pit.
Carnacki scoops Bains up in his arms and holds onto him as the shadow spreads outward, causing them to back up against another strange phenomenon: a force field that rises surrounds the entire neon apparatus in the form of gyrating, black funnel cloud. Carnacki pricks Bains’ skin to draw blood in an attempt to attract his AWOL soul, but he forgets that blood can also attract the “Monsters of the Deep,” and as the evil powers increase in violence, Carnacki lugs Bains’ rigid body out of the heart of the neon rings and stands between the violet and indigo circles where he hopes to be protected by the benevolent supernatural powers drawn to that end of the spectrum.
At that moment, the room is rocked by an explosion of supernatural squeals and grunts emanating from the pit in the center of the room, followed by the appearance of a glowing spot that rises from its depths, growing in size and clarity into the form of a gigantic, detestable hog’s face. Snorts and squeals begin echoing from the funnel cloud surrounding them, and – wedged between the swine sounds in funnel and the Swine Thing in the pit – Carnacki seriously considers using his revolver to kill Bains and himself.
Carnacki now realizes that this gigantic Hog looming above them is the manifestation of an entity referred to as the “Outer Monstrous One” in the Sigsand Manuscript (a metaphysical tome which is to Hodgson as the Necronomicon is to Lovecraft) – an evil elemental that once reigned over the world and is now using Bains’ mind to restore itself to power. Having realized this, Carnacki temporarily shelves his plan to commit suicide: he must do anything possible to save humanity from this unexpectedly powerful threat.
Grabbing the blue neon ring with one hand and collaring Bains with the other, he advances towards the funnel cloud wall, which recedes from the heaven-hued light, causing the Hog to evaporate in power. At first Carnacki imagines they have found a key out of their predicament, but the Hog immediately fights back by bodily possessing Bains, who wrenches out of Carnacki’s grasp and falls on all fours, squealing lustfully and scuttling towards the Hog’s half-faded form. But Bains cannot cross the barrier of the blue ring, and is trapped inside it with Carnacki, who overpowers him, tying him up with his own suspenders.
Furious, the Hog – its face melted away into a single, glowing eye and snout – advances on the outermost (violet) ring, causing it to disintegrate, before attacking the indigo ring (the last band left before the blue one that is protecting the two men), but they are unexpectedly protected by a second, great power – manifested by an otherworldly dome of blue and green light which immediately breaks the spell, causing the funnel cloud, pit, and Hog to vanish.
Exhausted and relieved, Carnacki has no more patience for Bains: he hypnotizes the now-wakened client (who was convinced that it was all just another dream), and commands him to immediately wake up if he is ever plagued with dreams of the Hog again, preventing him from descending into the deep, lucid dreaming that the Hog was depending on to allow It to cross from Bains’ consciousness into the mortal world. Looking around them, Carnacki sees the only evidence of their metaphysical battle: the indigo ring has been broken, and the violet tube has been entirely melted.
***
The story resumes with Carnacki sipping port beside the snapping fire while his friends look on in stunned disbelief at his wild and bizarre story. They are full of questions, but his best explanation is as follows: the earth itself is enclosed in concentric spheres which correspond metaphysically to the seven neon rings, and each sphere is inhabited by unique supernatural powers with unique appetites and desires. The farthest sphere extends nearly ten million miles away from the earth, and is home to entities like Hog who feed off of the souls of other entities (like humans and weaker spirits) with the ultimate aim of growing powerful enough to consume them all. Carnacki’s guests are deeply troubled – and confused – by all of this, but he is tired of lecturing and it is time to go: “Out you go!” he says – as always – and they file out into the quiet, dank dark of the London night.
ANALYSIS
Carnacki’s final case is probably his most complex and spiritually terrifying. There is more of a reckoning with the cosmic sublime here than in almost any of Hodgson’s short fiction. The story comes closest to touching the existential terror of The House on the Borderland, another nightmare vision in which human beings find themselves confronted by infinity, vastness, and the apparent meaninglessness of the universe. In such a world, the mutated humanoids and weed-choked landscapes of The House on the Borderland almost become secondary; what matters is the terrible realization that the universe is immeasurably larger, stranger, and less concerned with humanity than we have imagined.
And yet The Hog arrives at this cosmic horror through a remarkably intimate doorway: sleep. Bains’ ordeal begins not in some distant alien world but in the moment when an ordinary man closes his eyes and loses control of his consciousness. Hodgson makes sleep into a kind of threshold between worlds, a state in which the ordinary defenses of the human personality become porous. Bains knows that he must wake himself, but cannot; his waking consciousness can recognize the danger while his deeper self continues to descend toward it.
The story therefore turns one of our most ordinary and necessary biological functions into a terrifying act of surrender. Even Carnacki, who normally approaches supernatural phenomena with equipment, theories, and careful preparation, is ultimately forced to confront something that cannot simply be mastered by remaining awake and rational.
II.
This makes Bains more than merely the victim of the story. He is the vulnerable human being who stands at the boundary between civilization and animality. His involuntary grunting, his gradual loss of bodily control, and his eventual movement on all fours turn the abstract danger into something horribly physical. Carnacki is not merely trying to prevent a supernatural creature from entering the room; he is trying to preserve Bains’ humanity.
The Hog’s victory would be, in a sense, the reduction of a human being to appetite and instinct. Carnacki’s disgust at the porcine sounds coming from his friend is therefore also disgust at the possibility of humanity itself becoming animalistic. The story’s escalating imagery reinforces this transformation. At first there is only a sound: distant grunting from some unimaginable depth. Then comes the shadow, followed by the pit, the black cloud, the snouts, the hoof, the enormous face, and finally the Hog itself. Hodgson steadily moves from something that cannot be perceived to something that can almost be touched.
The horror becomes progressively more concrete while simultaneously becoming less comprehensible. This is one of the story’s great paradoxes: the more Carnacki sees, the less he understands. That paradox is particularly important because Carnacki’s defining characteristic is his faith in understanding. He is a ghost-finder in the tradition of the scientific detective. He collects evidence, constructs apparatus, consults ancient manuscripts, categorizes phenomena, and invents increasingly elaborate theories to explain what he encounters.
Even during his greatest crisis, he is observing, measuring, comparing, and theorizing. Yet his own elaborate apparatus is partly responsible for bringing the danger into such concentrated form. His desire to understand the unknown has itself become dangerous.
III.
This is where Carnacki’s hubris becomes central to the story. He has been “meddling,” as the Sigsand Manuscript repeatedly warns against meddling, and the story makes it clear that knowledge is not automatically synonymous with wisdom. Carnacki possesses considerably more knowledge than Bains, but that knowledge does not make him invulnerable.
In fact, it may be precisely his confidence in his ability to experiment safely that places both men in danger. His greatest strength—the willingness to investigate—contains the seed of his greatest weakness. This also helps explain why the story feels so different from the more conventional Carnacki adventures.
Usually, Carnacki enters a supernatural mystery, identifies the nature of the threat, establishes the appropriate defenses, and emerges as the triumphant rationalist who has successfully imposed order upon the unknown. Here, he barely survives his own investigation. He is reduced to carrying Bains around the room in terror, unable to devise an escape, and at one point contemplates killing both himself and his companion rather than allowing the horror to claim them.
For once, Carnacki looks utterly small. For once, we pity him. There is also something fascinating in the story’s uneasy mixture of Christianity and materialism. Carnacki’s vocabulary is scientific: electricity, vibrations, atmospheric forces, psychic bodies, energy, concentration, and physical manifestations. Yet the imagery remains stubbornly religious. The Sigsand Manuscript speaks of Satan, the cross, and God’s colors; Carnacki identifies blue as “God’s colour in the Heavens”; and when salvation finally arrives, it comes in the form of an almost numinous dome of blue fire.
IV.
Hodgson never completely resolves this tension. The protective force may be supernatural, or it may be some undiscovered physical principle. Carnacki himself cannot quite decide. That ambiguity is crucial to the story’s atmosphere. Rather than replacing superstition with science, Hodgson allows the two systems to overlap until neither is entirely sufficient. The universe remains intelligible enough to investigate but mysterious enough to inspire awe.
The final conversation consequently functions as both an explanation and a refusal to explain. Carnacki attempts to construct a vast cosmology in which the Earth is surrounded by concentric physical and psychic circles, and in which the Outer Circle breeds its own forms of life and intelligence. The explanation is wonderfully characteristic of Hodgson: simultaneously scientific-sounding, mystical, astronomical, and wildly speculative. Carnacki compares the Outer Monsters to sharks, tigers, and other predators, suggesting that they are not demons in the traditional moral sense but forms of life pursuing their own appetites.
And this is perhaps the story’s darkest idea. The Hog may not hate humanity at all. It may simply be hungry. That distinction places The Hog surprisingly close to the cosmic horror that would later become associated with Lovecraft. The monsters are terrifying not because they are embodiments of human wickedness in the conventional sense, but because they operate according to appetites and laws so alien that humanity cannot meaningfully understand them. To a human being, such a creature appears evil. But to the creature itself, humanity may be little more than food.
V.
Leigh Blackmore has therefore aptly noted the story’s resistance to the usual supernatural categories: Carnacki’s monsters may be preternatural rather than supernatural, immense forces that are horrifying without necessarily being morally evil. Like Lovecraft’s later cosmic entities, they reveal the puniness of mankind rather than merely threatening it.
This existential cosmicism brings Hodgson remarkably close to the astronomical weird fiction of Lovecraft—particularly At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Out of Time—despite the obvious differences between the writers. He belongs here alongside Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Oliver Onions, and Arthur Machen: writers who understood that the most frightening supernatural horror does not necessarily come from ghosts or devils, but from the possibility that reality itself is vastly stranger than human beings are equipped to comprehend.
The story’s ending is therefore fittingly strange. Carnacki survives, Bains survives, the immediate danger has passed—and yet Carnacki cannot stop investigating. Almost immediately, he is thinking about the new combinations of colors he might use in his apparatus. The catastrophe has taught him something, and his response is to experiment again. The cycle begins anew. His curiosity has nearly destroyed him, but it remains inseparable from the qualities that make him Carnacki.
VI.
That is perhaps the final irony of “The Hog.” Carnacki’s courage, intelligence, self-control, and scientific curiosity are precisely what save him. They are also what lead him into the abyss. He is a man who survives the encounter with cosmic horror not by defeating it, but by escaping it—and then sitting down afterward to devise a better experiment.
Regardless of when it was technically written, “The Hog” is traditionally remembered as Hodgson’s “last story,” and the designation is fitting. It opens a window onto the vast, punishing universe that so much of his fiction struggled to manifest: an existence in which human dignity, intelligence, ambition, and self-control are precious precisely because they are so fragile. Beyond them waits something older, larger, hungrier, and utterly indifferent—the enemy of human mastery, the foil to human dignity, and the vast, grinning face of oblivion.