The influence of the works of William Hope Hodgson on the literature of fantasy and science fiction has yet to be fully charted. Writers as diverse as H. P. Lovecraft, Olaf Stapledon, and Dennis Yates Wheatley have clearly been influenced by Hodgson's work. Although he won critical acclaim during his lifetime, Hodgson never gained a popular audience until after his death. His posthumous reputation, however, has grown formidable among critics of fantasy fiction, and while praise of Hodgson's work is often qualified (frequently regarding questions of style), critics almost invariably use such superlatives as classic or masterpiece to describe the author's best efforts. His reputation rests for the most part on two novels, The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912), and a group of stories set in the Sargasso Sea, a region in the Atlantic where seaweed is so thick it appears to be a landmass...