Medusa

Overview

...a little on one side of me, I spied something that moved along upon the verge with a sliding writhing motion, seeming like the extremity of a sort of trunk; like the body of a huge serpent… Drawn by horror's fearful traction, I moved to the verge of the parapet and looked down…

Somewhere around the early eighteenth century, young Will Harvell joins a sea voyage in search of a mariner’s missing son which gradually finds itself drawn towards an ancient and indescribable terror of the ocean in E. H. Visiak’s classic novel, which returns to print featuring a new introduction by horror expert Aaron Worth.  

Combining elements of Conradian sea adventure with Atlantean mythology and a uniquely unsettling brand of metaphysical, sublime horror—all delivered in Visiak's high literary style—Medusa remains a distinctive, influential and still exciting work in the history of early twentieth-century weird writing.

Author Biography

E. H. Visiak was the pen name of the British writer and critic Edward Harold Physick, an expert on Milton and celebrated Edwardian poet best known for Buccaneer Ballads (1910) and a handful of strange short stories. His novel Medusa (1929) is heralded as an important contribution to weird fiction.