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 voyage of a...

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 find a predictable...

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 classic literary...