Product Description: The story of an adventure in time and space that spans all of creation. A building, constructed across an invisible chasm of space-time, fated to witness the very end of the world, is waiting with open doors for anyone who dares to enter it.
Amazon.com Review: This classic novel of the weird supernatural, first published in 1908, was an important influence on H. P. Lovecraft. In the ruins of an ancient stone house in Ireland is found the diary of an elderly man who lived alone with his sister and their pets, and who longed for his lost love. The diary tells of how the man explores a cyclopean cavern beneath the house and fights off swarms of white pig-like monsters pouring up from below. Then, in a visionary sequence, he breaks through to an alternate space-time dimension and sees a doppelganger of his house on a vast desolate plain. The prose is hokey at times, but the strange mood evoked by the other-dimensional setting is powerful indeed. As acclaimed horror writer T. E. D. Klein says, "Never has a book so hauntingly conveyed a sense of terrible loneliness and isolation."
house on the borderland i first read this book in its original form many years ago, and it was already very old. it eventually got stolen from the library as its value had increased. it was out of print for many years. without ruining it for you i would recommend highly. i couldn't put it down the first time i read it and stayed up until about three to finish. kept the lights on after that. it is different than any other book i have read and is not a horror "story". it is actually a narrative document in first person, develops slowly but please read. the only reason not to like it is if you hate accounts that make you nervous. this manuscript involves a man who is at a very remote rural home and his dog discovers
Starts well... and then collapses
The House on the Borderland is one of the works which inspired H. P. Lovecraft, and it's easy to see why. A crumbling mansion in a forgotten corner of Ireland, in which an elderly man lives with his sister (shades of Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher) is an intriguing premise. The writing is decent and at times quite evocative.
An earthquake opens up a fissure in the ground, and to the old man's horror an entire nest of peculiar monsters is set loose in the land. Hodgson weaves a compelling narrative at this point; the efforts of the man to repel these creatures is well-described and engaging.
Then -- poof! the tale self-destructs.
The writer shifts gears and takes his main character on an astral out-of-body quest deep into the universe. Colors, flashing lights, and pages upon pages of description that amounts to nothing. It felt a little like the concluding shots of Dave Bowman's fall into the monolith at the end of 2001 -- trippy and drawn out.
In short, Hodgson abandoned his set-up and premise and drops us into an acid-trip. I'm guessing he wanted to weave a paranormal tale that deliberately leaves questions in the reader's mind. To do that well, however, there has to be a meaty story with some form of resolution. Lovecraft rarely gives his audience every piece of information, but there is substance and a concrete value to his metaphors. The House on the Borderland may have been his inspiration, but Lovecraft immeasurably improved on the craft.
Very disappointing.
Hodgson Ups The Ante William Hope Hodgson's first published novel, "The Boats of the Glen Carrig" (1907), is a tale of survival after a foundering at sea, replete with carnivorous trees, crab monsters, bipedal slugmen and giant octopi. In his now-classic second novel, "The House on the Borderland," which was released the following year, Hodgson, remarkably, upped the ante, and the result is one of the first instances of "cosmic horror" in literature, and a stunning amalgam of sci-fi and macabre fantasy. An inspiration for no less a practitioner than H.P. Lovecraft, the book really is a parcel of malign wonders. Once read, it will not be easily forgotten. I myself read the book for the first time some 20-odd years ago, and it has stayed with me ever since; a recent repeat reading has served to remind me of just why.
"House" takes the form of a found manuscript that had been written by "an old man" (we never learn his name, although he is one of the spunkiest, toughest, bravest old men imaginable) living in a very mysterious house in a desolate area of western Ireland. A recluse, living only with his elderly sister and his dog, Pepper (an animal who proves to be one of the gutsiest, loyalist pets you've ever encountered), he writes of the increasingly outre experiences he has recently undergone in this strange abode. We learn of his bizarre vision of a larger but identical house on some distant planet, watched over by the hideous gods and goddesses of Earth's past. In the manuscript's most exciting section, he tells of his battle with the "Swine Things" that besieged his home, and of his subsequent exploration of the great Pit from which they had emerged. In a segment that takes up almost half of his history, the recluse tells of his incredible voyage through time, space and dimensions, a journey that almost makes me wish that I had read this book in college, while under the influence of some psychotropic substance. This mind-expanding section boasts a sequence in which time superaccelerates, and Hodgson's descriptions here will surely bring to mind (and manage to outdo) the forward-traveling segment of the 1960 film "The Time Machine," with its rapid-fire sun/moon transitions. Hodgson's description of the last days of our planet and solar system, with a dead sun hanging ponderously in the sky over a frozen Earth, are almost as effective as H.G. Wells' in his "Time Machine" novel of 1895, with that author's dead, oily sea and (come to think of it) some crab monsters of his own. The recluse's cosmic journey after Earth's demise, and his visit to the Green Star and the "celestial orbs" (Hodgson's conception of heaven and hell?), are as mind-blowing, surely, as the "star gate" sequence in 1968's "2001: A Space Odyssey," and perhaps more meaningful. And any book that manages to rival Wells' and top George Pal and Stanley Kubrick in the cosmic spectacle department can't be all bad, right?
I used the expression "perhaps more meaningful" just now, and that "perhaps" might represent, for many readers, a significant drawback of "The House on the Borderland." For, although we are shown glimpses of many mystifying wonders in the recluse's tale, Hodgson does not deign to explain one of them. The origin of the Swine Things, the meaning of the counterpart House on another planet, the cause of the hermit's cosmic journey, the reason for the destruction of the House and many other conundrums remain mysteries by the book's end; not just open to interpretation, but practically demanding some sort of explication on the part of the reader. I'm not usually a fan of such open-ended stories (for example, the writers on the hit TV series "Lost" had better tie up every last loose end or I am going to be mighty P.O.'ed!), but here, it works somehow, only adding an aura of cosmic inscrutability to an already awe-inspiring affair. Hodgson writes simply in this novel, forgoing the pseudo-archaic 18th century English of "Boats" and the hyperadjectival, baroque language of 1912's "The Night Land," but still seemingly can't resist the urge to play with the language a bit. For example, I've never read a book with so many unnecessary commas, as in this sentence: "For, a time, I mused, absently." But again, this affectation works, only increasing the strangeness quotient of the book. Not for nothing was "The House on the Borderland" chosen for inclusion in Newman & Jones' excellent overview volume "Horror: 100 Best Books." Read it today for the awe and the shudders, and then tell me in the year 2030 how well YOU remember it....
Fascinating but disjointed weird novel As someone who really likes turn-of-the-century horror writers like Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, this book sounded like something right up my alley. Like a number of other reviewers, I thought the beginning chapters dealing with the pit and its creatures were terrific (in the true sense of the word), but the author lost me somewhat in the very long cosmological journeys through space-time that make up the middle of the book. It almost seemed like two novels--one that I really wanted to read, and one that I had to wade through to get back to the one I wanted to be reading. Unfortunately, the latter interfered with the experience of the former.
I'd still recommend it as a quirky and interesting--if ultimately a little disappointing--read for people who like the gothic fiction of this period. Some of it reminded me of H. G. Wells at his best, and I would definitely give other stories by this author a try.
The Roots of Horror Lovecraft spoke highly of Hodgeson, as did Smith. This particular book definitely fits into the genre of weird. The reason that I gave it only three stars is that I have read or seen these ideas before. However, the reason it gets as many stars as it does is that this is most likely the source of all those other texts and films. Many of the concepts that horror writers and film makers use seem to appear in this book, though long before they became so easily recognizable. I imagine someone reading this volume without having had the benefit of years of horror films and books to desensitize one to the concepts introduced, and I imagine that this book freaked the holy bejeezus out of him. Don't break the bank to get it, but if you're interested in turn of the century horror this will be one you won't want to miss.
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