ne of the leading names in classic weird fiction, William Hope Hodgson remains an influential and powerful storyteller, remembered chiefly for his nautical horror stories and for his occult detective, Carnacki the Ghost-finder. Hodgson’s career – cut off prematurely in World War One – was extensive and elaborate, and this book contains the cream of the crop: the Sargasso Sea Mythos, a broad selection of his best maritime horror stories, printings of his lesser known strange tales (including The Baumoff Explosive and The Goddess of Death), five of the most striking Carnacki cases, and excerpts from two of his elaborate supernatural novels.
Illustrated and annotated, these stories include episodes of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and mystery: floating stone ships, derelicts teeming with man-eating rats, ghost pirates, mutant weed men, carnivorous trees, parasitic fungi, were-sharks (you read that right), a ship with a heartbeat, a cursed room that whistles in the night, a castaway who refuses to let his hideous face be seen, freakish mutations, deadly ghost ships, bloodthirsty octopi, demonic hogs, and more. Hodgson’s fiction reveals a level of anguished vulnerability that blends the cynical realism with fantastic romanticism, creating a borderland – a liminal doorway – that brings the anxieties of the every-day into contact with the fantasias of the nightmarish.
The landscapes of his fiction – the weed-choked Sargasso Sea, the steaming South Pacific, Irish manor houses, derelict ghost ships – act as borderlands whereby these uncomfortable thoughts and existential pangs can enter into our world – to haunt and infect it.
The illustrated, annotated stories included in this unique anthology – stories of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and mystery – are among Hodgson’s best and will not fail to disturb, amuse, and inhabit your imagination.
