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Rating: The project by Edizioni Hypnos to present to the Italian public all the sea-themed stories of William Hope Hodgson concludes with the third volume titled The Demons of the Sea. The care of these three volumes is by Pietro Guarriello, one of the foremost experts in fantasy in Italy who, once again, introduces each story with passion and expertise and also signs the interesting postscript in which he analyzes The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" and The Ghost Pirates, his two novels always pertinent to the theme of horrors coming from the sea. I found Guarriello's comparison very interesting and fitting as he parallels the "weed-men" evoked by Hodgson in The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" with the sea creatures from The Shadow over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft.
The quality of the stories presented here is varied: alongside splendid tales rich with strong imagination, there are others (some realistic) which, while not dismissible, I consider not very significant within the "corpus" of his work. Even Hodgson's style does not always maintain high standards but sometimes appears careless. Among the stories present, I certainly consider The Voice in the Dawn a masterpiece: the story is set in the Sargasso Sea and completes the so-called "Tales of the Sargasso Sea" in which he was a master (he knew it from personal experience). The sighting by the crew of an island made from algae leads to its exploration, where a wreck abandoned for over 400 years is eventually discovered in the shapeless mass of vegetation. But what makes the atmosphere particularly eerie is the haunting call heard by the sailors of an unknown voice obsessively chanting the words "Son of Man!" (a biblical expression). The sense of supernatural mystery is remarkable and, in my opinion, here we find Hodgson at his best in describing (as noted by H.P. Lovecraft in Supernatural Horror in Literature) "the closeness of unnameable forces and monstrous impending entities...". Among the other stories, The Demons of the Sea impressed me, where a horde of metamorphosed monster beings (maybe the blasphemous crossing of different animal races) emerges from the ocean depths, terrorizing and killing the crew members, and The Dwellers on Middle Islet, which in its own way revisits the legend of the Mary Celeste, the ship found abandoned, adrift towards the Strait of Gibraltar in 1872. Again, we find monstrous hybrid creatures described, perhaps belonging to an unknown race. Yet even The Wild Sailor, although not seemingly a supernatural story, has an undeniable charm in outlining the figure of a sailor defined by other crew members as a "Jonah" (another term referring to a biblical-derived legend). The sense of cosmic sadness generated by the notes of his violin (played in solitude on the ship and heard only by a young cabin boy who idolizes him) evokes ancient mysteries buried in the ocean depths and is something truly poetic. A Crack in the Night offers good dreamlike cues while The Curse of the Lady Shannon is a sort of ghost story not unlike the Carnacki series.
Personally, I prefer the William Hope Hodgson of the novels, where his powerful imaginative charge finds full realization. However, it is undeniable that, at least at times, we can find in his best stories (like those of the Sargasso Sea) his golden vein.
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