Book 3: The House on the Borderland
I've owned The House on the Borderland for a few years; it's one of those books that I picked up at some used bookstore a while back (probably Powell's) because it's one of the stories that Lovecraft mentions now and then in essays or letters. And the author, William Hope Hodgson, has written some really compelling and great short stories (one of which, "The Voice in the Night," I'll be having more to say about soon). So I was looking forward to reading Borderland.
The book itself is REALLY neat. First published in 1908, it is very much a combination of horror and science-fiction. The plot is quite strange, about a man who moves into a strange house that may or may not be built on the crux of existence. It's quite easy to see how the book influenced Lovecraft, for The House on the Borderland is certainly about the cosmic horror that Lovecraft was so intrigued by. What starts out as something that might become a mundane ghost story very quickly becomes something more, as evil and madness begin to assault the narrator as he strives to cope with assaults on his home by armies of piglike demons, explores a creepy tunnel that leads to a vast pit under his house, deals with visions in which he becomes unstuck in time and can do nothing but watch as time speeds up so fast that decades pass in seconds and he eventually witnesses the heat death of the universe and sees what dwells at the center of existance and consumes all in the end, and deals with an unseen fungoid monstrosity that stalks his home at night. Among other ordeals. At times, especially as the narrator is hurtling through the depths of space experiencing things that man can barely comprehend, it gets a very "2001" sort of feel, a glimpse at something so immense and cosmic that unknowable that it always feels tantalizingly just out of reach of full comprehension... but you know something not good for humanity is going down, somewhere.
The problem is Hodgson's writing style; it's VERY archaic, in that he uses the comma to a distracting amount. Take the following excerpt as an example:
"Presently, I saw, rising up into the ruddy gloom, the distant peaks of the mighty amphitheatre of mountains, where, untold ages before, I had been shown my first glimpse of the terrors that underlie many things; and where, vast and silent, watched by a thousand dumb gods, stands the replica of this house of mysteries-this house that I had seen swallowed in that hell-fire, ere the earth had kissed the sun, and vanished for ever."
Cool stuff, to be sure, but 186 pages of enormous sentances infested with commas and em dashes and semicolons and everything else one can use to extend a sentance CAN get exhausting. And while the book does a great job at evoking the cosmic and showing us how strange the universe might be, the plot is basically "This guy in this house has all sorts of weird, seemingly unconnected adventures against weird monsters and has periodic visions of other dimensions and the end of the world." Which isn't really a plot at all. OH! And it ends with one of the most ham-handed cliches of the first-person narative, where the narrator is writing the final pages as the monster is about to break into his room, and instead of running or fighting or swooning he keeps writing until he's dragged away from his paper and his last word literally turns into a scrawl that drags off the page. Folks like to blame Lovecraft for pulling this stunt (especially in his early stories), but reading how Hodgson attempts to pull it off really puts into perspective how much better a writer Lovecraft was.
I'm glad Hodgson wrote the book, because it very obviously inspried Lovecraft a LOT to write the stories he did. And for that, I'm glad I read the book... but hoo boy. I think the book gave me comma poisoning.
The House on the Borderland: B
The book itself is REALLY neat. First published in 1908, it is very much a combination of horror and science-fiction. The plot is quite strange, about a man who moves into a strange house that may or may not be built on the crux of existence. It's quite easy to see how the book influenced Lovecraft, for The House on the Borderland is certainly about the cosmic horror that Lovecraft was so intrigued by. What starts out as something that might become a mundane ghost story very quickly becomes something more, as evil and madness begin to assault the narrator as he strives to cope with assaults on his home by armies of piglike demons, explores a creepy tunnel that leads to a vast pit under his house, deals with visions in which he becomes unstuck in time and can do nothing but watch as time speeds up so fast that decades pass in seconds and he eventually witnesses the heat death of the universe and sees what dwells at the center of existance and consumes all in the end, and deals with an unseen fungoid monstrosity that stalks his home at night. Among other ordeals. At times, especially as the narrator is hurtling through the depths of space experiencing things that man can barely comprehend, it gets a very "2001" sort of feel, a glimpse at something so immense and cosmic that unknowable that it always feels tantalizingly just out of reach of full comprehension... but you know something not good for humanity is going down, somewhere.
The problem is Hodgson's writing style; it's VERY archaic, in that he uses the comma to a distracting amount. Take the following excerpt as an example:
"Presently, I saw, rising up into the ruddy gloom, the distant peaks of the mighty amphitheatre of mountains, where, untold ages before, I had been shown my first glimpse of the terrors that underlie many things; and where, vast and silent, watched by a thousand dumb gods, stands the replica of this house of mysteries-this house that I had seen swallowed in that hell-fire, ere the earth had kissed the sun, and vanished for ever."
Cool stuff, to be sure, but 186 pages of enormous sentances infested with commas and em dashes and semicolons and everything else one can use to extend a sentance CAN get exhausting. And while the book does a great job at evoking the cosmic and showing us how strange the universe might be, the plot is basically "This guy in this house has all sorts of weird, seemingly unconnected adventures against weird monsters and has periodic visions of other dimensions and the end of the world." Which isn't really a plot at all. OH! And it ends with one of the most ham-handed cliches of the first-person narative, where the narrator is writing the final pages as the monster is about to break into his room, and instead of running or fighting or swooning he keeps writing until he's dragged away from his paper and his last word literally turns into a scrawl that drags off the page. Folks like to blame Lovecraft for pulling this stunt (especially in his early stories), but reading how Hodgson attempts to pull it off really puts into perspective how much better a writer Lovecraft was.
I'm glad Hodgson wrote the book, because it very obviously inspried Lovecraft a LOT to write the stories he did. And for that, I'm glad I read the book... but hoo boy. I think the book gave me comma poisoning.
The House on the Borderland: B