William Hope Hodgson

"...for this to be the especial glory of Love, that it doth make unto all Sweetness and Greatness, and doth be a fire burning all Littleness; so that did all in this world to have met The Beloved, then did Wantonness be dead, and there to grow Gladness and Charity, dancing in the years.

The Night LandWilliam Hope HodgsonThe Night Land is a classic horror novel by William Hope Hodgson, first published in 1912. As a work of fantasy it belongs to the Dying Earth subgenre. Hodgson also published a much shorter version of the novel, entitled The Dream of X (1912). The importance of The Night Land was recognised by its later revival in paperback by Ballantine Books, which republished the work in two parts as the 49th and 50th volumes of its celebrated Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in July 1972. H. P. Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature" describes the novel as "one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written." Clark Ashton Smith wrote of it that "In all literature, there are few works so sheerly remarkable, so purely creative, as The Night Land. Whatever faults this book may possess, however inordinate its length may seem, it impresses the reader as being the ultimate saga of a perishing cosmos, the last epic of a world beleaguered by eternal night and by the unvisageable spawn of darkness. Only a great poet could have conceived and written this story; and it is perhaps not illegitimate to wonder how much of actual prophecy may have been mingled with the poesy." When the book was written, the nature of the energy source that powers stars was not known: Lord Kelvin had published calculations based on the hypothesis that the energy came from the gravitational collapse of the gas cloud that had formed the sun and found that this mechanism gave the Sun a lifetime of only a few tens of million of years. Starting from this premise, Hodgson wrote a novel describing a time, millions of years in the future, when the Sun has gone dark

Thomas Carnacki is a most unusual detective. Operating in London at the turn of the Twentieth Century, Carnacki is an Occult Detective, investigating the paranormal and bringing to an end hauntings and spectral manifestations through the use of both the most modern science and traditional folklore. This edition contains all Nine of the Extraordinary Cases written for Carnacki by his creator, Wiliam Hope Hodgson The Gateway of the Monster The House Among the Laurels The Whistling Room The Horse of the Invisible The Searcher of the End House The Thing Invisible The Hog The Haunted Jarvee The Find

The novels and short stories of William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918), though almost entirely unknown during his lifetime, have become some of the most influential early works in fields of literature as diverse as fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Hodgson's earliest short fiction was inspired and deeply informed by his experiences at sea while a young man; his ambivalent attitude toward the ocean-mingled reverence, awe, fear, and hatred of it-is perhaps nowhere so starkly presented as in his "Sargasso Sea" stories, a series of fictions set in the shared world of the mythical Sargasso, a place of ancient derelicts, monstrous creatures, and hapless human castaways. Mesembria Press is proud to present this new collection of William Hope Hodgson's Sargasso Sea stories, which includes a complete set of notes designed to guide the interested reader through the obscure nautical terminology and stylistic nuances of Hodgson's writing. Includes: - From the Tideless Sea, Part I - From the Tideless Sea, Part II - The Mystery of the Derelict - The Thing in the Weeds - The Finding of the Graiken - The Call in the Dawn plus - Explanatory and critical notes