The Night Land [Paperback]

William Hope Hodgson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 9, 2009

The Night Land is a classic horror novel by William Hope Hodgson, first published in 1912. As a work of fantasy it belongs to the Dying Earth subgenre. H. P. Lovecraft's described the novel as "one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written". According to critical consensus, in this work, despite his often laboured and clumsy language, Hodgson achieves a deep power of expression, which focuses on a sense not only of terror but of the ubiquity of potential terror, of the thinness of the invisible bound between the world of normality and an underlying reality for which humans are not suited.

Editorial Reviews

Review

H.P. Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature" describes this novel as "one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written".

Clark Ashton Smith wrote of it that "In all literature, there are few works so sheerly remarkable, so purely creative, as The Night Land. Whatever faults this book may possess, however inordinate its length may seem, 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." --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 278 pages
• Publisher: CreateSpace (March 9, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 143828733X
• ISBN-13: 978-1438287331
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #987,922 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An absolutely unique vision, December 17, 1999

By 

pinlighter - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Night Land (Hardcover)

(This review is written with the earlier Amazon.com reviews in mind)

The ideas in The Night Land and in Hodgson's other early novel The House On The Borderland seem to have been derived from Wells The Time Machine. You can imagine the book as an attempt to map out the survival of humanity into, and beyond, the time of end of that story - the red sun, the beach, the swollen, flopping, things. Wells believed (with educated men of his time) that the sun had a lifetime of the order of 50 million years: therefore the idea of human survival into the Night was not as implausible as it might seem today.

What is unique about Hodgson is the fertility of his imagination and - and I find this extremely attractive - the way he mixes supernatural and scientific explanations for everything so completely there is really no separation. Some of the things that besiege the Last Redoubt are degenerate humans; some are animal; some come from other dimensions and have been let into this world by corrupt future sciences; many are hybrid of all three sources. Yet the most formidible, carnivorous psychic entities which will eat the souls of any human being they catch, are kept off from the Redoubt by what is unquestionably a technologically produced force field (maybe the first time this idea has ever been used in fantasy?).

The book has a flavour of ideas which no other has ever duplicated. There are things in it, merely thrown away, that could create whole sub-genres of fantastic and imaginative literature. For example, there is one point in the return journey where the heroine (remembering one of her many past lives) remembers a time when The Cities went always to the Westwards - a vision of a great metal roadway with cities on it moving round the slowed-rotation world in time with the Sun. These cities take in the harvest; others (forward on the road) have sewn the seeds; and behind comes a year-long night. The hero strains to remember his own life in that age, and cannot. And this - tremendous image - is one paragraph.

I cannot excuse the writing style, or the author's attitude to women, but I deny that these things are enough to make the book worthless. As well as being a tremendous adventure story it is a picture of THE END of humanity, as we are the beginning - and it succeeds in implying the whole span of humanity between those two points. For all its faults, I have never found a book to compare with it.

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars amazing and exasperating, August 20, 2001

By 

S. Clark - See all my reviews

This review is from: Night Land (Hardcover)

In broad outline, this book is cartoonish and childish, it reminded me a lot of the Marvel comics I read when I was a kid in the sixties.

But it's childishness is also its greatest strength, since Hodgson is the only author I know who can so potently conjure up the childhood terror of the dark.

Some of the visible monsters and hazards that are described are almost laughably preposterous, but Hodgson never blinks and ended up convincing me to suspend my disbelief.

One significant drawback is the meglomaniacal importance placed on the hero and his quest, it just doesn't quite ring true. A modern anology would be the Apollo 13 moon mission, I suppose, when millions of people were all thinking and worrying and hoping for the safe return of a handful of astronauts. So the phenomenon is not unprecedented, I just found that Hodgson treated it in an overly grandiose, facile and unconvincing way.

I read the same edition as one of the other reviewers below, the Ballantine one, and the second volume was somewhat edited, according to the preface. A lot of the excess romantic stuff was deleted. Even so, there are many long passages that are well nigh unreadable, because they are so over-the-top cutesy and mushy.

The faux 17th century writing style gets very wearing, as well, but it does succeed in significantly adding to the larger than life grandeur of the tale. It's a pity that Hodgson was killed in WWI, if he had lived to edit it, and clean up the style to make it more convincingly 17th century, the book would have benefited tremendously.

And another of the endearing qualities of the story is that the landscape and basic story premise is very psychologically evocative of any person living a hopeless, dispirited existence. It really succeeds as a psychological allegory, in my opinion.

Speaking of psychological things, Hodgson succeeds in describing many human emotions in a very tangible and palpable way. His

description of telepathic "good vibrations" pre-dates the hippies by many decades. And he is also very good as evoking how one's emotional state can drastically alter one's life in a very marked, and even physical, way. He was a writer of rare insight and sensitivity, and the world suffered a great loss when he died so young and needlessly.

It's been said in other places on the web, maybe not in these reviews here, that one of the most remarkable things about this book is that the tension is sustained for so long a time. I have to agree. One way that Hodgson does this is to adopt an almost journal-like structure for the story, each meal time in every day is covered, all along the quest. This keeps the focus of the story narrow and close down on the hero's level, so you never stop empathizing heavily with him.

All in all, I would say, that if you are a fan of fantasy, then you should definitely give this a try, it's an amazingly original and engrossing fantasy.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant..., March 21, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Night Land (Paperback)

Everyone raves about "The Lord of The Rings", but this is the real "grand-daddy" of the "modern" epic adventure. I read this for the first time when I was a young teen-ager (admittedly skipping the more "flowery" bits), and the book's dark and frightening imagery has haunted me ever since. I recently picked up an old copy and re-familiarized myself with it more thoroughly. Yes, the prose is repetitive, and Victorian in style, but it's all part of the experience. It takes a bit of discipline to plow through this tome, but it's worth it - knowing that you've completed reading so difficult and rewarding a book makes you feel good. Think about all the folks who have given up trying to wrestle with it..?! There are very few books written which are able to convey such senses of atmosphere and desolation. This is a book that you either like immensely, or hate completely. Hodgson was brilliant - what a shame that he died so young. Imagine if they made it into a film...WOW!