Book: The House on the Borderland

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson - 1908.

Two things tipped me off that this book might be great. The first was the second paragraph of the blurb on my 1980 Sphere papaerback:

"Horror-fantasy, science-fiction, pre-psychedelic odyssey to a private and alien cosmos, THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND is a blend of imaginative forms unequalled anywhere - or anytime."

The second was comments in the introduction, such as "The dialogue is unintentionally hilarious..".

This book essentially lived up to these two expectations, it reads a bit like Lovecraft (who has a comment on the cover "A classic of the first water", whatever that means), in the clunky style, but this does not detract from the overall feel of the novel. It essentially tells the story of two men reading a book found in the ruins of a house. This story takes two distinct parts, a bit like Dawn Til Dusk. The first section is him defending the eponymous house from the Swinefolk, a breed of half human half pigs. He does this seemingly without explanation, but with success. This section could easily be a plot for a zombie / horror B-flick. In the second section comes the pre-psychedelic odyssey, in which the protagonist watches time speed up until the universe ends, englufing itself into a green sun.

This book has everything for the reader who does not want everything explained. There is even an element of the unreliable narrator, where a woman features briefly in the remaining parts of the manuscript, but seems to have played a larger part in the destroyed sections. Like Lovecraft, and to an extent H.G. Wells, the author builds on what he has heard about Science, but never lets himself be shackled by mere possibility. Time travels quickly in a similar way to that of the Time Machine, which seems odd to us now. The Newtonian motion of the planets also seems strange to us, not to mention the race of swinefolk marauding the area of Ireland. To let this deter us however would be missing the point, it's all about getting pulled along by the feel and sweep of the story, in much the same way the protagonist is swept along by unseen forces throughout the universe.

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