A-Z Wednesday: The House on the Borderland

A-Z Wednesday is hosted by Reading at the Beach.

Here are the rules: Go to your stack of books and find one whose title starts with the Letter of the Week and post the following:

1. A photo of the book
2. Title and synopsis
3. A link (Amazon, B&N, etc.)
4. Come back here and leave your link in the comments

If you’ve already reviewed this book, post a link to the review as well. Be sure to visit other participants to see what books they have posted and leave them a comment (we all love comments, don’t we?) Who know? You may find your next “favorite” book.

THIS WEEK’S LETTER IS: H

My “H” Book is:

The House on the Borderland

by William Hope Hodgson

(New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1996)

Paperback, 186 Pages, Fiction

ISBN: 9780786702824, US$4.95

“A classic of the first order.” —H.P. Lovecraft

From the Cover: The House on the Borderland is set somewhere in the remote Irish countryside, sometime in the late nineteenth century. At an ancient, crumbling estate, overrun by wild gardens, resides a man who has a most unusual story to tell. A story that is a blend of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. He recounts his descent into the Pit, his desperate battle against sub-human creatures and his voyage across the dimensions of time. William Hope Hodgson’s extraordinary novel is considered to be one of the greatest fantasy tale in the English language. It compares to the best writings of Poe, Machen, Blackwood and Lovecraft. It is distinguished by its rare ability to evoke a fantastic world into which the reader is inextricably drawn, and then to sustain a level of wonder and mounting horror that is overpowering. As a beautifully written work of pure imagination it has few equals.

My Review: I just realized that it is Saturday night and I completely forgot to post this three days ago because I completely blitzed on what day of the week it is and it has been the first week of a new quarter and whatnot and so here we go, with some catching up on the memes I missed the last couple of days

So, continuing my “A-Z of Some of the Essentials of Weird, Horror and Science Fictions” is William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland. As with Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, Hodgson’s tight little horror story is a seminal piece in the genre. It is a novel that signaled a move away from the “realistic nature” of the supernatural fiction (i.e. of 19th Century gothic) and makes the move into greater cosmic horrors that would eventually influence many of the horror writers of the mid-20th Century, most notably H.P. Lovecraft.

William Hope Hodgson is an author who is pretty much unknown in America and who has been forgotten in his native Britain. This is a shame for as The House on the Borderland demonstrates Hodgson was a brilliant horror writer. Written in the early part of the 20th century, this author’s novel is an attempt to blend together horror, science fiction, and fantasy. Unfortunately, Hodgson later died in WWI, forever silencing a splendid talent. Without a doubt, Hodgson influenced later horror and fantasy authors with this jaunt through the spectral reaches of space and time. It is not difficult to see how this story influenced several big names in the horror business.

Lovecraft definitely borrowed some of the themes here to create his Cthulhu mythos. The detached method of having the horrors told to us through a strange manuscript also finds expression in several other supernatural tales written well after Hodgson’s book. In this respect, House on the Borderland is a groundbreaking work worthy of continued reprinting. Any fan of Lovecraft, Blackwood, or any of the other godfathers of horror needs to read this book if for no other reason than to get a glimpse into where their favorite authors cribbed ideas from. Without William Hope Hodgson, who knows where the horror novel would be today.