#66: The House on the Borderland
Weird fiction goes whole hog.
This review was originally posted to Twitter on March 14, 2019.
Initial release: 1908
Author: William Hope Hodgson
Weird fiction is sometimes seen as the descendant of gothic fiction, essentially building on what gothic fiction started, but reflecting a different set of values and themes, but it can be hard to identify the point of the shift among writers from one to the other. The House on the Borderland, William Hope Hodgson’s little known, but highly influential work written in the closing years of the pre-World War era, might be seen as a bridge between the two genres. Certainly, it’s got all the hallmarks of a classic gothic novel: an isolated manor house in Western Europe; a miserable, if fit, old man and his spinster sister and their pets; and a strange sense of foreboding and impending doom, all laid out by a rudimentary frame story. Conversely, it’s got several of the less savory trademarks of weird fiction: an almost total lack of characterization or development thereof (except maybe the dog, Pepper;) uneven plotting; and, perhaps most infuriatingly, long passages of hallucinatory cosmic nonsense.
First, the good things: plenty of atmosphere, and Hodgson is good at describing the house and its environs. The middle part of the book is by far the best, the protagonist moving about the house in his attempts to defend it from the monstrous pig-men he seems to have pissed off. Indeed, for good or ill, this book seems to be the originator of the “night of the living whatever” trope of heroes defending a house or other building from a swarm of monstrous enemies. At least, I can’t think of any earlier instance of same.
The bad: the first third and almost the entire second half of the book are interminable periods of cosmic hallucination as our hero first witnesses a blasted world upon which a copy of his house stands, and later sees Earth transformed, over millions of years, into said world. There’s no real rhyme or reason to it. The best we can gather is that the pig-men are from this haunted future Earth, but it’s never explained how or why they’re there, or why they’re coming up from below in 19th-century Ireland. in fact, very little is explained at all. It’s immensely frustrating because while I often don’t expect much in the way of explanation in my horror fiction (and will even argue that explaining too much runs the risk of ruining it) some authors will use that rule as a way of throwing in just random events.
Everybody’s favorite xenophobe H.P. Lovecraft, in his seminal “supernatural horror in literature,” obliquely calls the book “a classic of the first water,” which is gemstone industry slang for high quality; it’s easy to see why Howard liked it, as portions of the book resemble his dream fantasy work, in all its wordy, plot-stopping atmospherics. (A common misconception is that the novel influenced Lovecraft— untrue, as he did not read the book until 1934, well after the vast body of his work had already been written, and 16 years after Hodgson’s death serving on the front lines in World War I.)
Weird fiction has matured as a genre since those heady days of the early 20th century, and thank goodness. While it’s easy to see how The House on the Borderland is an early forerunner of cosmic horror, I can’t help but think it would have been better as a movie.
