[7] William Henry Helm, writer and critic, who married in 1881 Ada Emmeline Physick, the youngest daughter, was his maternal uncle.
[10] He published a poem in 1917 in The Ploughshare, the journal of the Socialist Quaker Society, edited by William Loftus Hare, and Hubert W. Peet, another conscientious objector.
He was among the broad-based group of writers in the New Age who followed Mary Gawthorpe's lead and contributed to Dora Marsden's Freewoman in 1911–2.
He wrote three short macabre novels of his own, The Haunted Island, Medusa and The Shadow, and the autobiography Life's Morning Hour.
The Shadow was incorporated in Gawsworth's anthology Crimes, Creeps and Thrills (1936), which also included Visiak's story "Medusan Madness".
[31] An essay on the novel by Karl Edward Wagner appears in the anthology Horror: 100 Best Books (1988; revised edition 1992).