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If Fitz-James O’Brien earned the distinction of the Celtic Poe, then de Maupassant is surely the Gallic Poe. “He?” is a manic marriage of elements from Poe’s doppelgänger epic, “William Wilson,” and O’Brien’s “What Was It?” The French were tremendously influenced by Poe—his writings were cherished by Baudelaire, whose translations of the American spawned a ravenous following among French bohemians and cynics. As H. P. Lovecraft noted, O’Brien—Poe’s Irish disciple—was notably

Starting in the Autumn of 2024, I began an ambitious project: returning to every anthology in my catalogue and relaunching each one as a fully restored, expanded, and comprehensively annotated edition. Many of the earlier volumes were originally produced while I was balancing publishing alongside a full-time teaching career, which meant making difficult choices about where to devote my limited editorial time. In order to continue releasing several books each year, I generally

Throughout his career Hodgson had a taste for mystery. His very first story – “The Goddess of Death” – was not unlike The Hound of the Baskervilles: something of an Arthur Conan Doyle pastiche involving a sham haunting that is exposed Scooby-Doo-style. Later he wrote “The Terror of the Water Tank” about a series of ghostly strangulations that are ultimately deduced to be caused by a mutated serpent crawling out of a neglected cistern, constricting its victims before slitherin

Long before the Bermuda Triangle entered popular folklore, there was another region of the Atlantic whose reputation inspired equal measures of curiosity and dread. Unlike the tempests of Cape Horn or the ice-choked waters of the Arctic, the Sargasso Sea owed its sinister reputation not to violence but to stillness. Mariners spoke of an uncanny expanse where the winds faltered, the waves subsided, and the sea itself seemed to fall into an unnatural slumber. Across its astonis

William Hope Hodgson is remembered today chiefly as one of the great architects of cosmic horror. Readers encounter him through the apocalyptic immensities of The House on the Borderland, the uncanny terrors of the Sargasso Sea stories, or the melancholy grandeur of The Night Land. Yet throughout his career another fascination repeatedly surfaced alongside his cosmic visions: the mystery story. Long before he invented Thomas Carnacki, Hodgson displayed an almost compulsive de

After publishing two Sherlock Holmes novels and a series of stories in The Strand Magazine, Arthur Conan Doyle discovered that readers had developed an insatiable appetite for Holmes' past. He obliged by introducing the detective's older brother, Mycroft, in "The Greek Interpreter," and later offering tantalizing glimpses into Holmes' youth in "The 'Gloria Scott'" and "The Musgrave Ritual." Hodgson's final Carnacki story to appear in The Idler similarly rewards longtime reade

Horses have traditionally symbolized sexual aggression and virility, appearing in folklore and mythology as harbingers of lust and fertility. Renowned for their now embarrassingly prolific erections, horses have long seemed to suggest the thirst in the human soul for unbridled (literally) sexual expression and desire. Even “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” has a deeply embedded erotic subtext in the form of its hard-riding Headless Horseman. Some have argued that Ichabod is liter

Although Hodgson is best remembered for the cosmic and biological horrors of his later fiction, “The Terror of the Water-Tank” reveals an author still experimenting with the conventions of the detective story. Like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales, the narrative presents an apparently impossible crime, a baffling collection of physical clues, and an investigator whose attention to overlooked details gradually reveals the truth. Yet the story also occupies a fascinat

“The Goddess of Death” was the very first story that Hodgson ever published in any form. Following the demise of his gym business, the imaginative body builder decided to turn to writing as a form of income, and cranked out this murder mystery set in British-held India during the late Victorian period. It has been almost universally scathed by critics, but I fear that they have been overly harsh on a valiant attempt from a freshman writer. The story certainly has its weakness

Published posthumously by Bessie Hodgson, “Demons of the Sea” is easily one of William Hope Hodgson’s most bizarre and revolting stories. It possesses a campfire-story quality (or, perhaps more appropriately, a "fo’c’sle yarn" atmosphere) that is impossible to miss in its closing lines—a classic “and on nights just like this, they say you can still hear…” type of chiller. Unlike many of Hodgson’s tales, however, it offers no scientific explanation, no cosmic theory, and no ra

I can say very little about this story without revealing some of its most important surprises. While there are tales in this collection—“Demons of the Sea,” for instance—that can withstand a few spoilers without suffering much damage, the power of "The Stone Ship" depends heavily upon mystery and discovery. Like so many of Hodgson’s finest sea stories, it begins with the appearance of a strange derelict: an impossible vessel that emerges from nowhere, interrupts the routine v

This is a new one for me: I’ve reviewed books, graphic novels, movies, even t-shirt companies, but I’ve never had the opportunity to review music before, and – boy – what an album this one is! When I was approached about it, the album was recommended to me on the strength of its often Halloween-ish lyrics (several of the songs brood with mysterious imagery of vampires, paranoia, ghosts, haunted houses, and spiritual isolation). Little did I know that – where I expected to fin

Hodgson had a proto-Lovecraftian penchant for buffeting his readers with unnamable, unclassifiable, inconceivable terrors—that is to say, "Things." Several of his stories employ that very word to lend an immediate atmosphere of alien menace: "The Thing Invisible," "The Real Thing: 'SOS'," and "The Thing in the Weeds." In his landmark study of supernatural fiction, Danse Macabre, Stephen King reduces horror's countless specters to five broad archetypes, each represented by a c

The following is one of several nautical tales by Hodgson inspired by genuine maritime legends and sailors’ lore. “The Mystery of the Derelict” is horrifying not because it is likely, but because it remains just plausible enough to feel possible. Indeed, it is precisely this uneasy plausibility that caused stories like it to circulate in forecastles and sailors’ berths for generations before and after Hodgson committed his version to paper. I will say little more than to draw

The first of Hodgson’s Sargasso Sea tales was “From the Tideless Sea,” describing the decades-long imprisonment of a ship in the weed-gagged waters. Scientifically speaking, Hodgson’s plot is ludicrous – especially in the age of steam, when – wind or no wind – freighters could chug across the Sargasso with no trouble whatsoever. But his story etched itself into the collective imagination: to this day, the common depiction of the Sargasso Sea is of a vast, weedy wasteland clut

Before you read on, be warned that the introductory notes to this story will contain spoilers… Like “From the Tideless Sea”—and so many of Hodgson’s other tales—“The Finding of the Graiken” concerns a Manly Man doing what Manly Men do: namely rescuing Damsels in Distress, breaking the law, assaulting weaker-willed men, killing monsters, and not giving a good goddamn. Published just two weeks before his marriage to the “not at all good-looking” Bessie Farnworth, the story ap

The following remarks on this story are quoted from Mr. Chris Walton’s 2008 article “Out of the Storm: The Apocalypse of William Hope Hodgson", from his superb horror blog, Ten Horned Beast. Mr. Waltons’ words eloquently and astutely analyze this text, and I will largely allow them to speak for themselves; his writing appears here – and later in the afterword analysis – by his permission: ‘For Hodgson the sea is never a benign environment, rather it is the lair of monsters

Starting in the Autumn of 2024, I began an ambitious project: returning to every anthology in my catalogue and relaunching each one as a fully restored, expanded, and comprehensively annotated edition. Many of the earlier volumes were originally produced while I was balancing publishing alongside a full-time teaching career, which meant making difficult choices about where to devote my limited editorial time. In order to continue releasing several books each year, I generally

The next story — a bawdy romp with burlesque overtones — remains one of Washington Irving’s most popular ghost stories and, among the “Stories by a Nervous Gentleman,” is rivaled in reprinting only by The German Student. The reason for its enduring popularity may also explain why Irving himself — despite the occasional disapproval of highbrow critics — continues to be widely read today: he was, above all else, an entertainer. Few American writers of his era possessed Irving

Starting in the Autumn of 2024, I began an ambitious project: returning to every anthology in my catalogue and relaunching each one as a fully restored, expanded, and comprehensively annotated edition. Many of the earlier volumes were originally produced while I was balancing publishing alongside a full-time teaching career, which meant making difficult choices about where to devote my limited editorial time. In order to continue releasing several books each year, I generally

One of the most celebrated selections from Tales of the Alhambra—and among the very few Irving stories outside The Sketch Book ever adapted into animation—“The Legend of the Moor’s Legacy” stands as one of his clearest homages to the wonder-tales of the East. Rhetorically, morally, and structurally, it shares much with the traditions embodied in the 1001 Arabian Nights. Much like “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” or “Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp,” the story concerns the tria

Between 1921 and 1924, over 1,500 craftsmen plied away at what would ultimately become the greatest, most intricate dollhouse in the world. Commissioned for Queen Mary – consort to George V and grandmother of Queen Elizabeth – it featured working electricity, hot and cold water, a garage with seven model cars and a motorbike, over 1,000 miniature paintings, and operable elevators. It was a 1:12 scale model of a royal townhouse with a Georgian façade and an English garden des

There are some fantasy books that pull you in with worldbuilding, some that win you over with characters, and some that keep you reading because you desperately need answers. Wrought in Flesh somehow manages to do all three. By the end, I found myself thinking not only about what had happened, but about everything that still felt unresolved in the best possible way. It left me wanting the next book immediately. This is an unapologetically dark fantasy novel with strong horr

The following story is perhaps most remarkable because we are not sure who wrote it. It was published in the first edition of Mary E. Braddon’s Christmas periodical, The Mistletoe Bough, a fiction magazine which ran successfully for fourteen years, every December, and was liberally graced with ghost stories and tales of the supernatural. In the Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, Michael A. Cox notes acknowledges that while there is no evidence as to who may have penned t