The House on the Borderland – William Hope Hodgson
In the west of Ireland is a village called Kraighten, beyond which the land is desolate and uninhabited although a fine spot for fishing for two friends who in their exploration arrive at a ruin on an outcrop of rock over a deep, circular gorge, within the walls of which they find a manuscript, the journal of the old man who lived in a house older still and rumoured to have been built by devil.
Through the night over their campfire, the two companions read the account of the strange happenings which occurred in “this house that stands on the borders of the Silences,” a crack opening in the earth which disgorges creatures which attack through the night, determined and with an intelligence more than animal, and of strange dreams, the writer swept away to a ring of mountains around a plain on which sits a jade structure of enormous size identical in shape to his own home above which he sees visions of “the old gods of mythology.”
A prolific writer of the early twentieth century perhaps best remembered for his short stories featuring the occult detective Thomas Carnacki, some of which have already been gathered by the British Library, they have now revisited William Hope Hodgson’s 1908 novel The House on the Borderland for inclusion in their Tales of the Weird series, a strange journey of the imagination into the Earth and across time beyond the limits of the solar system.
Published when the author was just thirty and only ten years before his death in the trenches of the Great War, in structure there is much which reminds of the journey of the narrator of Olaf Stapledon’s later novel Star Maker yet The House on the Borderland is more consciously abstract, a voyage not so much of our universe and the laws which govern its operation and the motion of its bodies but another dimension whose laws are incomprehensible and malleable.
Assailed by the creatures of the pit, the aggressiveness and violence of the relentless swine-things is surprising for the outwardly genteel age in which the novel was written, though if there was any precedent it is the Morlocks of The Time Machine of H G Wells which also considers the scope of change over deep time and the decay of worlds as the stars run down, but regardless Hodgson’s work was ahead of its time in the cosmic mysteries and horror described.
Regarded as a masterpiece by H P Lovecraft though despite the parallels in their work he apparently did not read the novel until late in his own literary career, as befits a structure situated on a border the story alternates between two states, one abstract and dreamlike as the writer drifts forward through time, untethered, and the other solid and more dangerous, and as the savage encounters are apparently concluded, the pit sealed over by a torrent of water, the first phase resumes.
“The Recluse” undergoing an altered perception of place and time yet retaining a grasp on perspective, that the sky is the firmament and it is the Earth below which spins, he observes and mentally notes all he witnesses to be recorded later, astonishing sensory impressions and the ideas they suggest, the belief that the house is not natural creeping into his mind, that the stone from which it is built is not taken “from any Earthly quarry.”
Hodgson familiar with the west of Ireland, his father the Reverend Samuel Hodgson having served in a parish in Country Galway, The House on the Borderland is more abstract than the Carnacki tales yet sits (un)comfortably in the wider body of his work, floating through a dream state but expressing a similar fascination with old houses and the inexplicable mysteries they contain which tethers the narrative, using the author’s often used tool of a vicarious report on an incident rather than a first hand witness, a novel to be experienced rather than analysed and an overdue inclusion in the Tales of the Weird, the ideals of which it embodies and expands.
The House on the Borderland is available now from the British Library
