The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson

This difficult part where you can loose track of the story is just a part of the bigger story. Lost in a universe that is forever expanding.

The reader can certainly lose his grip on the story, as the Recluse looses his grip on reality. But once we get to the hallucinatory part, where the Recluse drifts off into outer space and gets lost into the great expanse, the reader gets lost as well in a universe of words and gets entangled in an overgrowth of elusive events and of intangible and incomprehensible meaning. The short story begins very pleasantly and mysterious. While the nightly attacks keep getting worse, his hallucinations take him on a terrifying journey witnessing the death of Earth, floating through the universe, where he encounters his long lost love by the Sea of Sleep. But he is also plagued by terrible hallucinations taking him to otherworldly dimensions, to behold godlike creatures and the swine-like creatures and in the middle of this Plain of Silence stands his house. Soon he discovers a great pit underneath the gardens and is attacked by swine-like creatures. He writes that he bought this isolated house to live in as a recluse with his sister Mary and his dog Pepper. While Berreggnog reads this story to Tonnison, the narrative jumps to the story of the Recluse. They also discover a journal that was written by an unnamed Recluse who wrote down his unbelievable story. Tonnison and Berreggnog, the narrator of the story are on a fishing holiday, when they stumble upon the ruins of a house, an overgrown garden and a large lake.

It explores other worlds, our world and more importantly our fleeting human lives. It combines a realistic setting with science fiction and the supernatural and in doing so creating a whole new genre like weird fiction and cosmic horror, that was later on further formed and shaped by Lovecraft amongst others.Īlthough this novel isn’t exactly an easy or relaxing read, it is an important work in the horror genre and especially the cosmic, Lovecraftian, weird fiction subgenre. Full with otherworldly creatures and beings, and a quest through time and space and dimensions, this novel was one of the first to abandon the Gothic horror genre and leave the Victorian ghost stories behind. The House on the Borderland is a supernatural weird fiction tale that is both hallucinatory and weird. The House on the Borderland takes you on a hallucinatory and confusing trip through time and space.

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson