According to the great horror writer H.P. Lovecraft "The Ghost Pirates...is a powerful account of a doomed and haunted ship on its last voyage, and of the terrible sea-devils (of quasi-human aspect, and perhaps the spirits of bygone buccaneers) that besiege it and finally drag it down to an unknown fate. With its command of maritime knowledge, and its clever selection of hints and incidents suggestive of latent horrors in nature, this book at times reaches enviable peaks of power." In this 1909 novel, William Hope Hodgson cleverly portrays the ghosts' gradual enslavement of the ship, without ever clearly revealing the ghosts themselves, only the absolute horror of their presence. Writer Robert Weinberg described it as "one of the finest examples of the tightly written novel ever published."