Author: William Hope Hodson / Year: 1877-1918 / Genre: Crime-Mystery British author William Hope Hodgson‘s Carnacki the Ghost-Finder first saw the light of day in 1913. Consisting of six short stories, drawn from the pages of The Idler and The New Magazine, the collection was ultimately expanded to include nine stories, the last three being discovered after Hodgson’s early death at age 40 in April 1918. In this fascinating group of tales, we meet Thomas Carnacki, a sort of occult investigator in Edwardian London. Just as Carnacki seems to be patterned on a similar fictional psychic investigator of the time, Algernon Blackwood‘s John Silence, a casual reading of the Carnacki stories will reveal the influence that Hodgson’s Sistrand Manuscript, Outer Monstrosities and “electric pentacle” defense had on later authors such as H.P. Lovecraft (an admitted fan of this book, although he much preferred Hodgson’s novels) and Dennis Wheatley. These nine tales all have a similar framing device: Carnacki calls four friends — Arkright, Tayor, Jessop (could this be the same able-bodied seaman Jessop who was the only survivor of the Mortzestus sinking in Hodgson’s 1909 novel The Ghost Pirates?) and our narrator, Dodgson
