E. H. Visiak

He was born in Ealing, London. Both his father, Edward James Physick (the younger), and his grandfather, Edward James Physick (the elder), were sculptors. His maternal uncle was W. H. Helm, writer and critic. He went to Hitchin Grammar School (now Hitchin Boys School), and became a clerk with the Indo-European Telegraph Company. He contributed poetry to The New Age and Dora Marsden's Freewoman. During World War I the poetry he wrote, in opposition to it, cost him his job. When conscription was introduced, he became a conscientious objector. After a short time teaching he became an independent scholar, living very quietly. During the 1930s he collaborated on some short stories, with John Gawsworth in particular. A friend and enthusiast of the Scottish novelist David Lindsay, Visiak wrote three short macabre novels, The Haunted Island, Medusa and The Shadow, and the autobiography Life's Morning Hour. He provided an introuctory note for Lindsay's novel A Voyage to Arcturus. The Haunted Island features the adventures of Francis and Dick Clayton in the seventeenth century, who sail a seized ship to one of the Juan Fernandez Islands. They there fall into the hands of pirates, meet a ghost, and a wizard who rules over a colony of slaves. Ultimately they find a treasure. The Shadow was not published separately but was incorporated in John Gawsworth's anthology Crimes, Creeps and Thrills (1936) (which also included Visiak's story "Medusan Madness"). Much of Visiak's supernatural work bears similarities to that of William Hope Hodgson since both writers were fascinated by the lure and power of the sea, which forms the focus of the majority of their literary work.