u/SlySymphony

A book that I find immensely captivating because of its strange alien landscapes and its prescient philosophical outlook for a book that came out in 1920. And I know I'm not the only one who finds this book fascinating, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis loved it, as does Paul Giamatti. It may not be very widely read but it has captured the interest of some very influential figures so I thought it best to read and was not disappointed.

The plot (for what little of it there is) concerns a man named Maskull who attends an occult seance with his friend Nightspore. While at this seance they befriend a man named Krag who tells them that his home is in the Arcturus star system. Maskull doesn't believe him but decides to humour Krag's offer to go to his home. They travel to Arcturus in a starship made of crystalline light and the immense G-force that he's exposed to causes Maskull to pass out. When he wakes up he finds himself on a planet named Tormance with three new sensory organs sprouted from his body and his two friends nowhere in sight.

That's about all the plot you get in this book. The vast majority of the rest of the story is dedicated to scene setting, location descriptions and philosophical discussions with the aliens that Maskull meets. Other events do happen but a lot of the events don't feel interconnected, the narrative is quite episodic and disparate. Clearly the surface-level plot is not the focus. Where the story does makes sense (and clearly the thing that Lindsay wants his readers to focus on) is the philosophical discussions, themes and symbols that the characters discuss/embody.

Before I touch on the philosophy, I want to give a shoutout to Lindsay's imaginative world. Tormance is a strange planet, so strange that he creates two new primary colours to emphasise its alienness: jale and ulfire. Jale is described as "dreamlike, feverish and voluptuous" while ulfire is "wild and painful." While this does fundamentally misunderstand how humans perceive colour, I appreciate the attempt at making new primary colours. Because of this human limitation, Lindsay creatively gets around that by describing them through the emotions that they instill in people rather than their actual appearance. It shows a mind that clearly has a knack for the captivatingly unusual. There are other interesting world tidbits, the shrowk is another highlight of the story (it's the serpentine dragon thing pictured above) as is Leehallfae, they're an alien that is neither male nor female which necessitates the invention of a new set of pronouns to refer to them by which are ae/aer.

The meat of the story is the philosophical discussions between various aliens and to go into that in depth would take up way too much time so I'll mention some that I personally found fascinating: there is a lot of discussion around moral obligation and murder. The first alien that Maskull talks to, Joiwind, tells him that he should not harm any living thing without thinking of her first. Joiwind herself only drinks gnawl water for sustenance, she doesn't even eat plants (although on Tormance the distinction between animal and plant is almost non-existent) because they are living beings too in what I can only interpret as an extreme form of veganism. However, the first alien he comes across after Joiwind, called Oceaxe, essentially calls Maskull a coward for sticking to this lifestyle and if he wants something he should take it. That's what she and her partners do, in their world the strong should rule all and if someone isn't thriving then they aren't strong enough to take what they need. It is worth mentioning that Oceaxe's magn (an organ that grows out of the heart and allows the being to feel empathy for others) has been mutated into a third arm. Maskull is pressured by her into doing the same to his magn and it's not long after that where he starts killing most of the aliens he comes across, including Joiwind's brother who is travelling to visit her. I have my own interpretation of what that means and I am leaving out some smaller details that may influence your own interpretation of these events but those are the broad strokes of just one philosophical outlook in this world. There are also discussions around the difference between male and female and how much biological sex has to do with gender, there is discussion around spiritualism and how that ties back into morality. There is a gnostic bent to this book where its implied that Krag is the demiurge and has tricked Maskull into walking a path that the true god of the universe doesn't approve of. All of this is just scratching the surface of what this book talks about and I still haven't made heads or tails of everything. There is so much to mine from this thing, it's insane.

I adored A Voyage to Arcturus. The ending confused the shit out of me, that was a complete mindfuck. But anyone interested in science fiction, fantasy or philosophical fiction owes it to themselves to read this book. I think it is a masterpiece.

This is my favourite pre-Tolkien fantasy novel. I have yet to read anything by William Morris, James Branch Cabell and Abraham Merritt, among a couple of others so this could change. And if those authors are able to reach higher highs than this book does then the Victorians were eating really good when it came to fantasy fiction.

This is a cozy fairy tale-esque story about a man called Nathaniel Chanticleer who is the mayor of a town called Lud-in-the-Mist. Lud is the capital city of the human country Dorimare, which borders Fairyland over to the west. The Fae are a banned topic in Dorimare as they're seen as a danger to humans (which is quite funny as you can see hints that the fae helped establish Dorimare as a country in the first place throughout the book). This belief is only strengthened when Ranulph Chanticleer, Nathaniel's son, finds a piece of fairy fruit in Lud and eats it. Thing is, when ingested by humans, fairy fruit acts as a drug: it makes the consumer more paranoid, induces hallucinations, that kind of thing. And Nathaniel isn't the only person in Lud who has eaten fairy fruit recently, quite a few youths have fallen prey to it. Nathaniel has no idea how the fruit is getting into the town as, like everything else fae related, it has been banned. So at the recommendation of his doctor, Nathaniel sends Ranulph to a farm in a town called Swan-on-the-Dapple so he's nowhere near the fruit-infested Lud and then organises a party of friends and law enforcers to try and figure out how the fruit is getting into the city.

The stakes in this story, as you can probably see, are a lot lower than most fantasy stories. There aren't any world-ending stakes or a grand battle between kingdoms, it's just a father trying to do what's best for his son and his town. The setting is very warm and inviting and some of the descriptions of place are genuinely beautiful. There's a description of place in the first chapter that made me tear up because I thought the landscape Mirrlees described was so gorgeous. The tone of whimsy pervades all aspects of the story, from the locations to the character names (e.g. Ambrose Honeysuckle, Mumchance, Moonlove etc) to the exclamations people say (e.g. "by the sun the moon and the stars!" and "Toasted cheese!") it all comes together to make a story that feels so wholesome. It's the most unironic, pure, blue-eyed embrace of all things innocent and pure and it's absolutely delightful to read.

The characters in this book are fairly broadly drawn. The characters aren't flat but they aren't very complex either. They're given just enough personality to the point where you can tell them apart and understand their outlook and plight but no more than that. Nathaniel is a very hard working man meaning he can't be there for his son and because of that he's quite neurotic when it comes to his son's safety, especially after he eats the fairy fruit. That's about all the characterisation he gets but its enough to invest in his story, especially in a fantasy novel that's only 250 pages long. It's quite short as far as novels in this genre are concerned.

Lud is a delightful fantasy book. Like most things I read, it is available for free online as it is so old and if you love optimistic fantasy then this is a must-read in my eyes.

I read the original Night Land before this remake. I won't go into my thoughts too deeply on the original because they will pop up in the main body of this discussion but my general feeling towards it was deep frustration. Because it's strengths were Mount Everest high and its weaknesses were Mariana Trench low. The original is a book that I wished I liked more than I did which is why I'm happy that James Stoddard produced this remake. This addresses a lot of the weaknesses of Hodgson's original and keeps all of its strengths.

The premise of this book is that an 18th century gentleman named Andrew falls in love with a lady named Mirdath. They get married but Mirdath dies in childbirth. In the aftermath of this death Andrew has a premonition of the Earth, millions of years in the future and this vision takes up a majority of the book. We only come back to the 18th century in the last chapter. In this future Andrew is named Andros, the sun has died, Earth has been plunged into a perpetual darkness and most of humanity has been wiped out. What little remains of it is held up in an 8-mile-tall metal pyramid called The Last Redoubt. At the top of this pyramid are a group of wizard scholars called Monstruwacans that keep tabs on the wasteland's many threats to ensure that they don't penetrate the defenses of the Redoubt. Andros gains an ability called Night Hearing (telekinesis by another name) with which he starts receiving messages from a woman far out in the darkness calling for help. Andros suspects that this woman, named Nani, is the reincarnation of Mirdath. She tells Andros that she and her people are held up in a smaller pyramid called The Lesser Redoubt and their defenses are slipping. They need help. So Andros dons a suit of armour and arms himself with a weapon called a diskos, which is a pike with a spinning saw blade on the end. He ventures out into the night land to try and find The Lesser Redoubt to save Nani and her people.

Just typing out that premise makes me want to go back and re-read it. It's such a sick world that Hodgson has built. It's by far the best thing about both versions of this story. I will never forget the second chapter, where Andros is standing with the Monstruwacans looking out on the night land and seeing its many dangers: The House of Silence, which cannot be penetrated, even with their futuristic technology and lures any human that walks near to come inside, never to be seen again. The Night Hounds, horse sized canines that attack in packs like wolves. The Silent Ones, that are completely docile until they reach a specific plain, where they all rabidly slaughter each other. And the four watchers, beings that are dozens of stories tall and are moving towards The Last Redoubt so slowly that they look like they're completely still. They are getting closer and will reach the pyramid eventually. It's only a matter of when, not if. And if they see anyone outside the pyramid, they silently let the other night land denizens know about it. And in this world, dying to a monster will damn your soul for eternity. It's far better to commit suicide than fall prey to any creature of the darkness. Which is why anyone venturing out into the night land is given a cyanide pill to kill themselves just in case they find themselves in a dire situation.

That's just the tip of the iceberg of what the night land contains. I didn't even talk about the crashed airships which hint at older civilisations, how cities inside The Last Redoubt are organised and what their culture is or what lies beyond what the Monstruwacans have mapped. This is my favourite setting in any piece of fiction that I've yet experienced. No wonder it's produced so much fan fiction, it's a gold mine for story ideas.

A Story Retold also addresses a lot of the issues that the original Night Land had. The characters in the remake are given more personality than in the original. Andros is more defiant and somewhat naive to the dangers of The Night Land as he is just a newcomer to this place. He often gets himself into trouble because of these qualities, despite what others warn him of. But he's also incredibly persistent which gives him the drive to keep going to find his partner, even when his spirit is nearly crushed by one of the watchers. Nani is someone struggling with the mental turmoil of being given a second chance at life when her family wasn't. This mental struggle sometimes manifests in rash decisions, endangering herself without considering what the consequences may be. It's clear there's some kind of trauma affecting her. But when the two meet up about halfway through the book it's clear the two do very much love each other. I'm generally not one for love stories but I didn't mind this one so much. It was certainly better than the romance in the original, whose power dynamics were very unbalanced. This one is much more even keeled.

Perhaps the biggest issue that the original had that this remake goes some ways to fixing is the prose. Hodgson wrote the original Night Land in an archaic, pseudo-Elizabethan English that I think was a good idea on paper but in practise was a complete travesty. Hodgson was not technically skilled enough to pull that style off and the result was a prose style that was repetitive and incredibly clumsy. It made the moment to moment reading experience a massive slog. Stoddard writes his version in contemporary English which made it much easier to read, as well as adding dialogue where the original only had 1 word of dialogue in all 200,000. It helps to flesh out the characters when you can hear them speak.

One issue I did have with the remake was actually this change in prose style. I do think the archaic English did help to separate the world of The Night Land from our own, helped to make it feel more alien. When presented in a form of English that I'm familiar with it felt like a place that's closer to our own Earth. As I said, I think the idea of writing this story in that older dialect was a good idea, it's just that the author writing it wasn't capable of writing in that style. I don't think the answer was to change styles. It does slightly frustrate me that there isn't a definitive version of this story because if it were competently written like that, I reckon this would be a contender for my favourite book of all time.

As it stands I think The Night Land: A Story Retold is a lovely read that improves on its base in just about every way that a remake could have. This is evidence to me that the media that should receive a remake is not media that was good the first time around, but media that had potential but didn't completely fulfill that potential. Because while this doesn't reach the fullest extent of that potential either, this is much closer to what I wanted out of Hodgson's original tale. Please read this if you haven't.

This is a novella that one could argue is cosmic horror, although I think you could also just as credibly argue that it's more folkloric than it is cosmic. Whatever you call it, I call it fantastic and so did H.P. Lovecraft who thought it was the "finest weird story" he'd ever read.

It's about two men canoeing down the Danube river. They land on a small island in the centre of the river to camp for the night but when they wake up in the morning they find that their canoe has had a giant hole slashed into the bottom of it and one of their paddles is missing. They scrounge around the island to find resources to patch up the hole as the raging rapids begin to tear chunks of land off their island. All the while there's a pernicious sense that something untoward is also present, but it's not clear exactly what it is.

Blackwood's strength in this story (and all of the stories I've read by him) is how he paces slow burn horror. This story is not in a hurry to get anywhere, it really wants its characters and its reader to stew in this uncomfortable sense that something is wrong. Small hints are drip fed to the reader that something is amiss about this island but these clues don't point towards any specific culprit. At least, not at first. For the first half - two-thirds of the story the reader is in a very uncomfortable mindset where they know that there is a threat out there but they don't know what it is or what it's motivation is. That is not to say that nothing happens, things do happen. In one case something quite spectacular is seen by the protagonist and there is a chase sequence towards the end of the story. However, The Willows is clearly a story that is primarily centred around its eerie ambiance as opposed to its plot or characters.

A big part of this general unease is how Blackwood personifies nature. He attaches a lot of emotionally charged words to his descriptions of nature. When the men are being tossed around by the Danube, Blackwood refers to nature as "playing" with the men and when they decide to land on the island with all of the willow trees and bushes, the men see the trees branches moving in the wind as the trees waving a welcome to the pair. That waving takes on a much more sinister meaning upon a re-read. These small touches that Blackwood gives to the setting makes it feel like a character that is intentionally reacting to these characters as opposed to just a place where the story happens.

There's also some tension between the two men. The main character calls the Swede (he's never given a name, he's only ever referred to as the Swede) his friend but they bicker so much that I question whether those two are really close. While that may sound like it would get annoying, in my experience it only adds another sense of tension to an already tense story.

I can't say much else without getting into spoilers as this is a short novella and I don't want to spoil it. You can read the whole thing in about 2 hours and, like a lot of media over 100 years old, it is free to read online. I think anyone interested in horror should at least give The Willows a try.

This is a somewhat forgotten and foundational piece of cosmic horror. Most people who are interested in H.P. Lovecraft's inspirations know about Hodgson but most people I've talked to who read don't know this author or this book which I think is a shame. Hopefully this post can go at least a little way to exposing Hodgson to people who may not know about him.

The premise is that two fisherman are walking along a river in Ireland, trying to find a spot to cast their lines when they happen upon the ruins of an old house. Curious, they investigate the ruin and find an old diary buried in rubble that belonged to the old man that used to live there. The men return to their tent to read the diary, which makes up the majority of the book. The fishermen are just a frame narrative to set up the main story, which is recounted by the unnamed, reclusive old man who lived with his sister and his dog Pepper in a house that the locals warned them is cursed. The recluse, his sister and Pepper live in the house for a decade without any issue but, as you have probably guessed, their tenancy doesn't stay uneventful.

One night the recluse goes on a celestial voyage (how this happens is never explicitly stated but there is an explanation that the reader can infer from context clues) beyond the bounds of our universe to the scene that is depicted on the cover I've enclosed. The book paints this scene in such vivid detail that what I pictured in my head was roughly what the cover artist drew. When the recluse returns home he finds a giant canyon has appeared on his property, out of which crawl a mob of 6-foot-tall pallid pig-men that proceed to terrorise his house.

The main thing that appeals to me so much about this book is how imaginative Hodgson is, especially in how he creates memorable images. The aforementioned cosmic voyage is the first one that springs to mind but there are other scenes like him venturing into a cave that takes him beneath the foundations of his house that is as memorable as it is chilling. Even smaller things how he describes the speech of the swine-things is so immediately striking and memorable. I'll quote that passage here because I don't think I could put it better than Hodgson did: "Out in the gardens rose a continuous sound. It might have been mistaken, by a casual listener, for the grunting and squealing of a herd of pigs. But, as I stood there, it came to me that there was sense and meaning to all those swinish noises. Gradually, I seemed able to trace a semblance in it to human speech—glutinous and sticky, as though each articulation were made with difficulty: yet, nevertheless, I was becoming convinced that it was no mere medley of sounds; but a rapid interchange of ideas."

The actions sequences in this book were also very tense and exciting, the siege on the house by the pig-men being the scene that springs inexorably to mind. To my knowledge this is the first example of an individual/small group are trapped in a house with a horde of monsters outside trying to get in, Night of the Living Dead style. Feel free to correct me on that if any of you know an earlier example than this. The scene sees the recluse with his rifle sprinting back and forth across his house, barricading the doors and firing upon and swine-things that manage to breach his defenses. Which does sound quite bog-standard for the modern reader and it is for the most part but there's an element of subtle psychological horror that makes this scene more disturbing than first glance may suggest but I feel getting into that would be spoiling the book so from here on out I'm going to be talking spoilers. My TL;DR of this is, despite being rough around the edges, the imagination that Hodgson displays in this book is so wild that it almost single-handedly carries this book to being one of my favourites that I've ever read.

Spoilers: >!how the recluse's sister reacts to all of these horrific events is very interesting to watch. She always appears more scared of the recluse than the swine-things. Combine this with the fact that she's never in a position to see the pig-men and the fact that we're only hearing these events from the recluse's perspective and you can credibly come to the conclusion that the recluse has gone insane and the pig-men are just a delusion that his mind has made up. After the night when the pig-men besieged the house, he goes outside and doesn't find a single trace of them, only damage he did to the property is there. The interesting thing about this is that Hodgson never leans one way or the other on this potential madness, it could all actually be happening and the sister is only seeing how her brother reacts to these very real monsters. Or it could be that her brother has gone mad. That's left ambiguous and it does offer some re-readability to the book, allowing you first to take it at face value and then re-read it with the knowledge that you're reading the account of a potentially unreliable narrator.!<

>!The last cosmic vision is also worthing of note. In it, time begins to speed up, slowly at first but then faster and faster and faster. The sun becomes a river of fire in the sky because it's moving so fast that the recluse cannot see it as a star. The recluse dies and it happened so quickly that his soul didn't realise that his body had already decayed. As a disembodied ghost, the recluse watches the universe die with himself inside it. And then it turns out that was a cosmic vision and not reality. It does wear out its welcome, with Hodgson eventually falling into a cycle of re-describing events that have already happened when he isn't sure where to take the scene next but the imagery carries it to another high point of the novel.!<

In conclusion, House on the Borderland is such an influential horror work that I rarely see anyone talk about outside of the Lovecraft/weird fiction circle which I think is a shame. It is far from flawless (I could've made this post twice this length if I mentioned the issues I had with it) but it is so crazy in its massive scope and imagery that I think it is worth trying if you are a fan of horror.