Never a member of the literary establishment, William Hope Hodgson achieved no great fame as a writer, but he is one of the few minor Edwardian writers of horror fiction whose work is regularly republished. The unfettered quality of his best work has ensured him continued representation to this day on shelves beside more-lurid writers such as Stephen King. Hodgson saw himself primarily as a writer of sea tales, and many of his best short stories, as well as some of his longer works, combine a nautical setting with the sense of horror, isolation, and decay paralleled in works such as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895), and Arthur Machen's The Hill of Dreams (1907). As well as creating monsters from the deep, he was also interested in the more conventional ghostly and occult tale, as is evident in the series of...