“The best spooky tales to read this season” by Michael Dirda (WP)

Believe it or not, but I saved the link shared by the best ever publisher Hippocampus Press a while ago (before Hallowe’en, I believe!), got distracted by something fairly mundane and completely forgot to post it in time! But better later than never, so here we go: a brilliant (as usual) analysis of a bunch of horror editions, old and new, by Michael Dirda, including the most recent releases by fantastic Hippocampus Press, “The Voice in the Night: Best Weird Stories of William Hope Hodgson” and “Where the Silent Ones Watch”:

Though best known for its authoritative editions of Lovecraft, Hippocampus Press also issues work by other grandmasters of supernatural literature, most recently “The Voice in the Night: Best Weird Stories of William Hope Hodgson,” edited by S.T. Joshi. No one who has read this collection’s title story — I first encountered it in a high school English textbook — ever forgets “The Voice in the Night.” On a starless night in the Pacific, a becalmed sailing ship is unexpectedly hailed by a voice from the darkness. The unseen man in a small boat begs for some food but refuses to approach too closely. Eventually, the voice recounts how he and his fiancée were shipwrecked and saved from death only when their raft drifted to a nearby island, much of it covered by a “gray, lichenous fungus.” It would be unfair to say more, except that this is a tale of equal parts horror and pathos.

Hodgson (1877-1918) wrote many stories about monstrous entities lurking in the weed-world of the Sargasso Sea or breaking through from other dimensions, but also four ambitious novels, “The House on the Borderland,” “The Ghost Pirates,” “The Boats of the Glen Carrig” and “The Night Land.” In this last a far future Earth has been reduced to a treacherous wasteland, its small population huddling in “the last Redoubt” and constantly threatened by things that would frighten Lovecraft’s Cthulhu. It’s an enormously long and wordy novel, but the British Library’s paperback line, Tales of the Weird, publishes the text in its entirety, while MIT’s Voices From the Radium Age offers a more manageable abridged edition. It’s one of those visionary, over-the-top masterworks like George MacDonald’s “Lilith” or David Lindsay’s “A Voyage to Arcturus.”

To honor Hodgson and his fiction, James Chambers has assembled more than two dozen tribute stories by contemporary writers in “Where the Silent Ones Watch” (Hippocampus). ©