Reading this after the Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal as it was one of the inspirations.  Hodgeson is a competent writer but this is a very frustrating book to read.  The narrator is a friend of Carnacki who attends regular dinners with the titular ghost-hunter where there is a very fixed routine - no conversation before dinner and only telling the story afterwards.

Honestly the framing device, pretty typical of the period's horror stories, comes across as confusing.  The Doylian reason is so the hero's knowledge of the arcane/forbidden doesn't have to be laid out.  In this case, the dinner ritual becomes baffling and Carnacki's peremptory ejection of his guests as soon as he's finished telling his story makes the reader wonder why he bothered to invite them.

The only Watsonian explanation I can offer is that Carnacki is holding a bragging session but even that doesn't entirely work.  Just about half the cases don't have supernatural explanations and most of the horror is diluted by coming to the reader second-hand.  Carnacki spends a lot of time trying to describe the indescribable and it falls rather flat.

The saving graces, when compared to the likes of Blackwood or Lovecraft, is that Carnacki is neither suave nor infallible.  He proclaims himself to be a skeptic but he's not convincing.  He does his very best and puts considerable work in. Not for Carnacki the Holmesian languor or clinical diagnosis from the comfort of his armchair.  He goes around the whole thing, explores for rational explanations and only falls back on the supernatural after he's exhausted the rational.

This could be really engaging but the biggest problem is that none of the stories are really engaging. None of the plots are really strong enough to sustain the tension and the actual horror/supernatural cases are never really explained in a satisfying way.  The explanations are never really established beforehand and the way Carnacki addresses causes of the events are off-hand and unsatisfying.