Extollager
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2010
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It seems Chrons hasn't had a thread devoted to this classic author, which surprises me, but if it's there I didn't find it and it must have been inactive for a long time.
I just read The House on the Borderland for the 4th time all the way through. Unlike The Night Land, this book doesn't use a pseudo-old-fashioned diction, but the punctuation was idiosyncratic--lots of superfluous commas. But it reads well. It must surely be the most "Lovecraftian" novel to be published prior to Lovecraft's own writings.
It has a few main sections:
0.The finding of the manuscript in a very remote part of the west of Ireland. The finders are Englishmen looking to do some angling. This aspect may remind readers of some of John Buchan's writing.
1.First sequence related in the manuscript: The narrator (late middle age or older) tells of a strange cosmic experience he had, which brought him to a valley under a weird sun, in which he saw a host of effigies, some of them recognizable as the gods of Egypt and India, etc.
2.The siege of the swine-creatures: Emerging from a nearby pit, repulsive pig-men try to get into the House where the narrator and his elderly sister live. There's a little bit of the feeling of Neville trying to keep out the vampires in Matheson's I Am Legend or the Mel Gibson character barricading his house in Signs. If you liked that stuff you'll probably like this. The Hodgson narrator finds that though the monsters exert physical force against the house, leaving scratch marks and damaging a door, their bodies eventually disappear, as if vaporizing, when shot, though he doesn't see this happen. He clears his property of the creature and then investigates the pit, finding a lengthy tunny and a seemingly bottomless subterranean chasm. Lovecraft would have devoured this.
3.The narrator endures a journey through time to a cosmic revelation. This begins with a gradual speeding-up of the passage of day and night, with effects a la Wells's Time Machine, which must have been an inspiration. These are well done. When the earth's air freezes and becomes a deep layer of snow, the reader may wonder if this inspired Leiber's excellent "A Pail of Air." In general the cosmic journey is impressive. The changes in the aging sun reminded me of Vance's conception of the Dying Earth. There are a few paragraphs in which the narrator is reunited with the spirit of his lost love that may seem bathetic. Hodgson continues the story past this point, which some authors of the time might have used at the crowning moment before returning the hero to everyday life, for further weird and dreadful scenes.
4.The narrator returns to consciousness in the House. An even more horrifying version of the swine-creatures, phosphorescent and hypnotic, is trying to get in and mauls his dog, leaving a glowing hand- or claw-patch on its side. The narrator realizes too late that when his suffering dog licked him, he himself picked up the phosphorescence, which is spreading from his wrist to cover more and more of his body. There was something of the quality of Lovecraft's "Colour Out of Space" here. At this point the narrator is writing down notes of things as they occur, in the manner of some of Lovecraft's stories, and the point at which the story ends is extremely Lovecraftian.
00.A few concluding paragraphs that return us to the finders of the manuscript. They learn that the House apparently vanished when a great collpase of earth occurred and it fell into the pit.
The book is framed by a couple of poems not obviously relevant to the plot.
One often reads about Lovecraft's being influenced by Poe and Dunsany, but the Hodgsonian influence, on the basis of this short novel, must have been enormous. It's loaded with elements that Edmund Burke characterized, in the 18th century, as conducive to the sense of the Sublime: darkness, sudden noises, vastness of height and, moreso, of depth, "difficulty," etc. It strikes me as a classic that's very much alive.
I just read The House on the Borderland for the 4th time all the way through. Unlike The Night Land, this book doesn't use a pseudo-old-fashioned diction, but the punctuation was idiosyncratic--lots of superfluous commas. But it reads well. It must surely be the most "Lovecraftian" novel to be published prior to Lovecraft's own writings.
It has a few main sections:
0.The finding of the manuscript in a very remote part of the west of Ireland. The finders are Englishmen looking to do some angling. This aspect may remind readers of some of John Buchan's writing.
1.First sequence related in the manuscript: The narrator (late middle age or older) tells of a strange cosmic experience he had, which brought him to a valley under a weird sun, in which he saw a host of effigies, some of them recognizable as the gods of Egypt and India, etc.
2.The siege of the swine-creatures: Emerging from a nearby pit, repulsive pig-men try to get into the House where the narrator and his elderly sister live. There's a little bit of the feeling of Neville trying to keep out the vampires in Matheson's I Am Legend or the Mel Gibson character barricading his house in Signs. If you liked that stuff you'll probably like this. The Hodgson narrator finds that though the monsters exert physical force against the house, leaving scratch marks and damaging a door, their bodies eventually disappear, as if vaporizing, when shot, though he doesn't see this happen. He clears his property of the creature and then investigates the pit, finding a lengthy tunny and a seemingly bottomless subterranean chasm. Lovecraft would have devoured this.
3.The narrator endures a journey through time to a cosmic revelation. This begins with a gradual speeding-up of the passage of day and night, with effects a la Wells's Time Machine, which must have been an inspiration. These are well done. When the earth's air freezes and becomes a deep layer of snow, the reader may wonder if this inspired Leiber's excellent "A Pail of Air." In general the cosmic journey is impressive. The changes in the aging sun reminded me of Vance's conception of the Dying Earth. There are a few paragraphs in which the narrator is reunited with the spirit of his lost love that may seem bathetic. Hodgson continues the story past this point, which some authors of the time might have used at the crowning moment before returning the hero to everyday life, for further weird and dreadful scenes.
4.The narrator returns to consciousness in the House. An even more horrifying version of the swine-creatures, phosphorescent and hypnotic, is trying to get in and mauls his dog, leaving a glowing hand- or claw-patch on its side. The narrator realizes too late that when his suffering dog licked him, he himself picked up the phosphorescence, which is spreading from his wrist to cover more and more of his body. There was something of the quality of Lovecraft's "Colour Out of Space" here. At this point the narrator is writing down notes of things as they occur, in the manner of some of Lovecraft's stories, and the point at which the story ends is extremely Lovecraftian.
00.A few concluding paragraphs that return us to the finders of the manuscript. They learn that the House apparently vanished when a great collpase of earth occurred and it fell into the pit.
The book is framed by a couple of poems not obviously relevant to the plot.
One often reads about Lovecraft's being influenced by Poe and Dunsany, but the Hodgsonian influence, on the basis of this short novel, must have been enormous. It's loaded with elements that Edmund Burke characterized, in the 18th century, as conducive to the sense of the Sublime: darkness, sudden noises, vastness of height and, moreso, of depth, "difficulty," etc. It strikes me as a classic that's very much alive.
