English writer William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) wrote a prodigious amount of fiction-weird, adventure, mainstream, and even proto-science fiction-during his relatively brief career, cut short when he died in Belgium during the final stages of World War I. This volume presents the best of his tales and demonstrate the wide range of his short fiction.
From the ghost story "The Goddess of Death" (1904) to the posthumously published tale "The Hog," Hodgson is preoccupied with supernatural incursions into our mundane world. "The Hog" is one of the most accomplished tales of the psychic detective Thomas Carnacki.
As a seaman in both the Mercantile Navy and the Royal Navy, Hodgson had his fill of life on the sea. Many of his tales deal with the horrors to be encountered in the vast expanse of seas and oceans. "The Voice in the Night" (1907), perhaps Hodgson's most notable weird tale, speaks of the hideous fungi consumed by a shipwrecked couple on a remote island. "The Derelict," "The Mystery of the Derelict," and several other stories deal with other terrors to be met with in such mysterious realms as the Sargasso Sea.
William Hope Hodgson was, for many years after his death, a nearly forgotten master of the weird. But in recent decades his literary accomplishments have been increasingly recognized, and this volume puts the very best of his short fiction in the hands of a new generation of readers.
