William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) was born in the great Victorian era of classic horror writing. He lived in Essex, England but moved several times with his family, including a stint in County Galway in Ireland – a setting that would later inspire The House on the Borderland. Hodgson made several unsuccessful attempts to run away to sea, until his uncle secured him some work in the Merchant Marine. His association with the ocean would unfold later in his many sea stories. After some initial rejections of his writing work, Hodgson managed to become a full time writer of both novels and short stories, which form a fantastic legacy of adventure, mystery and horror fiction.

Jonathan Newell (Foreword) is an instructor at Langara College in Vancouver, Canada. A specialist in weird and Gothic fiction, his scholarship focuses on the links between affect and ontology in works of supernatural horror. His first book, A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832-1937: Disgust, Metaphysics, and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror from the University of Wales Press, traces the twisted entanglement of revulsion, ecstasy, mysticism, and ontological speculation through the works of authors like Algernon Blackwood, H.P. Lovecraft, and William Hope Hodgson.