The Night Land

William Hope Hodgson

Jun 2009 · The Floating Press

About this ebook

Described by H. P. Lovecraft as being "one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written", The Night Land is a classic horror fantasy novel by William Hope Hodgson published in 1912. Telling the story of a dying earth, The Night Land starts with a man from the 17th century who, mourning the death of his true love, is given a vision through the eyes his future incarnation. In that distant time Earth is only dimly lit by the remaining glow of the dead Sun. The last millions of the human race cluster together inside the Last Redoubt, a huge metal pyramid, and are set upon by mysterious forces from the dark outside. Leaving the protection of their refuge means certain death, but our narrator makes mind contact with a survivor in a forgotten Lesser Redoubt. He must journey alone through the evil darkness to find her, knowing that she is the reincarnation of his past precious love. Writer Clark Ashton Smith said that "In all literature, there are few works so sheerly remarkable, so purely creative, as The Night Land... it impresses the reader as being the ultimate saga of a perishing cosmos, the last epic of a world beleaguered by eternal night and by the unvisageable spawn of darkness. Only a great poet could have conceived and written this story; and it is perhaps not illegitimate to wonder how much of actual prophecy may have been mingled with the poesy."

Ratings and reviews

Yes, the language is difficult to get used to. Don't read it for well crafted prose. If you can get over your modern sensibilities, this vision of humans lost in an alien time is a majestic work of emotion and imagination. For me, the story of WHH's life, death, and conduct in war provided a much better connection to his work. The themes in this book are not just theoretical imaginings of someone at a desk. There are strange parallels between this story, and the later horror scape of WW1 battlefields.