Awake in the Night Land

by John C. Wright, Vox Day (Editor)

AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND is an epic collection of four of John C. Wright's brilliant forays into the dark fantasy world of William Hope Hodgson's 1912 novel, The Night Land. Part novel, part anthology, the book consists of four related novellas, "Awake in the Night", "The Cry of the Night-Hound", "Silence of the Night", and "The Last of All Suns", which collectively tell the haunting tale of the Last Redoubt of Man and the end of the human race. Widely considered to be the finest tribute to Hodgson ever written, the first novella, "Awake in the Night", was previously published in 2004 in The Year's Best Science Twenty-First Annual Collection. AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND marks the first time all four novellas have been gathered into a single volume. John C. Wright has been described by reviewers as one of the most important and audacious authors in science fiction today. In a recent poll of more than 1,000 science fiction readers, he was chosen as the sixth-greatest living science fiction writer.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Fiction, Weird Fiction, Dying Earth, Lovecraftian

302 pages, Hardcover

First published April 10, 2014

About the author

John C. Wright (John Charles Justin Wright, born 1961) is an American author of science fiction and fantasy novels. A Nebula award finalist (for the fantasy novel Orphans of Chaos), he was called "this fledgling century's most important new SF talent" by Publishers Weekly (after publication of his debut novel, The Golden Age).

Reviews

[Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read the reviews of this on Amazon and thought I have to read it for myself, I figured if it was half as good as they were saying it would be a good book.

It's far better than then I had hoped, it's just as good as the reviewers claim. The sum exceeds the parts, it's a masterpiece made from smaller masterpieces. Take "The Mocking of Christ with Mary the Annunciate and Mary the Elder" by Frans Schwartz, for example. The alter piece consists of five pieces, depicting Christ being mocked by the crowds and plotted against by the rulers, to either side the Marys with pain, sorrow and adoration sitting, and standing in the middle, bruised and battered before His trip to the cross, is Christ, painted with a spirit of humanity and the divine. Each of the pieces are works unto themselves, but together they tell a much greater story, with Christ at the center.

So to is this novel. On the surface it's a horror sci-fi, not a blood and guts horror, but more along the lines of Lovecraft horror and a blend of the older sci-fi novelists like Bradbury mixed with modern overtures, especially for the ending story.

It's C.S. Lewis, Chesterton, Meville, Tolkien, Bradbury, Hardy, it's all these and more, and yet, it's all Wright.

I had never read the original book, however Wright paints the landscape and world with such skill and attention it doesn't seem to be necessary.

Alright, so enough with praise, what's the book about? Hope when there is no reason to hope. Humanity in the face of inscrutable and monstrous inhumanity.

4 stories, 3 set directly in the Night Land. There the last of mankind is living in the Last Redoubt, a seven mile tall pyramid of a metal made in ages beyond reckoning, on the dying planet Earth, long after the sun had spent itself out. The technologies required to keep the place running are so ancient as to have passed into mythology and ritual understanding. All around the Last Redoubt lies the Night Land, inhospitable, poisoned, dark, and filled with inhuman, eldritch forces bent on wiping out the last of humanity, seeking to destroy the body and consume the soul to all that fall under their power.

These forces are straight out of Lovecraft, out of nightmares. These things range from twisted creatures of flesh and bone such as the abhumans, twisted animals like the Night Hounds, and then there are things outside human understanding, outside the normal bounds of space and time. Whispering voices, tempting the listener to venture outside the protection of the Last Redoubt and past a protective circle of Earth-Current and into the domains of fell creatures, monsters beyond human comprehension, named only by their attributes. The Silent Ones, The Thing That Nods, The Slowing Spinning Wheel just to mention a few. Places like The Silent House where no sound has even been heard issuing forth for as long as humanity has been studying it, and where men, driven mad, have gleefully ran into, never to be seen or heard of again. And then there are the Watchers, behemoths the size of hills, slowly, slowly moving toward the mighty fortress, advancing at a glacier pace and inexorable as entropy. Alive and yet not, bending their strange powers at the Great Redoubt for millennia.

Death will come to humankind; it has been foretold to the last days, the last stand, the Last Child, and humanity will be extinct in a dead universe, ruled by beings of total malice and outside the laws of life and death. And against all of this stands humanity's last home, standing in the face of this doom, peopled with untold millions human souls aeon after aeon in grand defiance of powers no human can hope to stand against, much less overcome. And these Things besiege the Last Redoubt for countless years, like the siege of Troy, a siege lasting for aeons.

The greatest minds of mankind, toiling for millions of years, can't do more than watch the advancement the inhuman forces. The very best they create, the Last Redoubt, was to merely slow down their extinction, there was no solution to drive back the darkness, no Ring to destroy, no savior coming to fulfill prophecy, no inventions with enough force to do more than help one man possibly survive the Night Land.

It sounds like something out of fever dream, born of a mind made unstable by forces dimly perceived at best. And maybe the original was. Wright then takes this forlorn hell and makes it his own. The landscape unthinkable in it's alien nature, hostile to all normal human sympathies and notions, but the burdens the characters bear are wholly human; they are our burdens of lost loves, lost friends, lost family, paths of redemption, paths of duty and honor, the ageless cry of "Why? Why us? Why me? Why now?" and having hope beyond what can be seen and felt. Wright deftly blends in Greek and Roman traditions, the cornerstones of Western Civilization. For me, this grounds the book's heroes, these are people who have lived more than once, and who we know and can recognize for they are us. The inhuman fantastic world throws the humanity into sharp relief, the story elements drawn from our past pulls the people even closer to us.

The lights of the Great Redoubt shine forth, defiant in the face of Things of unthinkable malice and incomprehensible force. The light shines in the darkness, a beacon to those in the Night Land, illuminating the path when possible, giving a means to orientate the wanderers toward humanity and all good things. The light shines forth from the cities of Man, millions adding their small light the greater whole, and the darkness, not understanding, consumes all. The light shines up until the end of humanity.

And that's just the first 3 stories, the fourth is where Wright really taps into CS Lewis and Chesterton. I can't summarize it without revealing too much. It's tightly written, tying together different ages of mankind and their stories into a whole that takes on more meaning at the end.

I can't do this book justice, it surpassed my meager skills to do so; I only hope to add my voice to the chorus of supporters and not to mar the book's impact for other readers.

[Kat · Rating 5 out of 5]

John C Wright is not for everybody, and a series of novellas set in the same realm as an obscure, early piece of weird fiction that almost nobody today has read is probably even less for everybody, but I loved this anthology to bits and pieces--figuratively, because it was an ebook, and I would be sad if my e-reader no longer functioned.

Wright captures perfectly the awful grandeur of William Hope Hodgson's creation, the last bastion of humanity, besieged in its seven-mile tall Redoubt, on a world populated by eldritch horrors, unlit by any but the most ghastly of flames. He captures it perfectly, and expands upon it, imagining the societies that must have lived (or, rather, will have lived) there, the trials they face, the decisions, for good and evil, that they make.

My favorite story was the first, "Awake in the Night Land," with a truly beautiful, redemptive ending that improves on Hodsgon's vision. The second, "Cry of the Night Hound," impressed me with a new take on a very old story. I won't tell you which one, because even though the clues are pretty obvious in retrospect, it still took me half the tale to figure it out, and I enjoyed the discovery so much I would never take that thrill away from someone else. The third tale, "Silence of the Night," included some of the most horrifying imagery I have ever encountered, and chilled me to the roots of my soul. The fourth and final tale, "The Last of All Suns," was an interesting departure from the Night Land proper, and included some more John C Wright-y elements, like mashing together lots of different genre tropes and characters and making them all interact with each other; it was fun and weird and terrifying and profound.

If I have one quibble (I do, here it is), it was the profusion of typographical, especially in the last tale. Perhaps a later edition can correct that fairly minor flaw.

[James Stoddard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awake in the Night Land by John C. Wright

I meant to read this for some time. I didn't realize what I was missing. It consists of four short works that are arguably the best stories based on William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land that have been written. In my opinion, the sheer suspense Wright brings to these tales exceeds even the original. Nor does Wright neglect the topic of sacrificial love, whether for a friend or a lover. I will warn you that the final story requires a careful reading, as Wright's characters debate the meaning of life, death, and existence. You will probably disagree with some of the points he makes, because the author doesn't create "straw men;" arguments from various sides are all equally represented. But I'm making this sound dull, which it isn't. It is a book of wonders.   

[Dan Maguire · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Night Land is a terrifying place of poisoned waters, deranged abhumans, and ghastly, gigantic Things That Watch. Against this encroaching oblivion, the dwindling number of men must make their stand in The Last Redoubt.

Wright has a gift for the written word that cannot be taught. A writer either has it or he doesn't. Wright has it and then some. The stories are sometimes horrifying, sometimes inspiring, but the language itself is always engrossing. Once you start reading it is difficult to stop.

My personal favorite was the second tale. Fantastic finish here.

I found certain passages of the final story difficult to follow, as different characters struggle to understand what is happening, and some of the characters are quite technically and scientifically advanced. That's not a problem, per se, but it is challenging to get through certain passages. I also am still thinking about the ending, which was unexpected, but the fact I'm still thinking about it means that the author was hitting the right notes.

This was an excellent collection of novellas that defies genre or other categorization. Part sci fi, part fantasy, part horror. It really was a great reading experience.

[Andreas · Rating 5 out of 5]

We are 21 Million years in the future, the sun has gone out already and the moon doesn't exist anymore. In the Last Redoubt the surviving humans live and defend against the nightmarish creatures of the Night Land, knowing through the use of advanced technology that in another 7 million years they will fall too.

The setting is unique and allows a lot of weirdness but there is also room for romance, heroes and of course horrendous beasts who are able to launch physical and mental attacks.

The first 3 novellas are about ventures into the Night Land. I liked the first most because it didn't focus too much on the journey itself but got its power through the relationship between two friends and a woman.

What absolutely blew my mind though was the last novella, "The Last of All Suns", in which Wright explores the last seconds of the universe. He does it from a scientific and also from a humanistic point of view and the result is fantastic. This is what Science Fiction is for and I am thrilled that there are authors out there who tackle such questions. Wright does it in his typical style, which might not appeal to everyone.

Highly recommended!

[Mary Catelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a sequel by other hands, being based in the setting of William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land. However, I can assure you that it stands alone.

It consists of four stories, three set in the Last Redoubt, and a fourth set at a mysterious location that only slowly unfolds. The first three have their time given in a line up front -- which tells us, also, how many years they are before the extinction of mankind.

That is part of the setting. All take place after the sun and the moon were lost, and the sky so clouded to give not even starlight. The Last Redoubt is besieged by monsters. There are the abhumans, savages creatures once human; Night Hounds with teeth like sharks; the Watchers, enormous, glacially slow in motion, maliciously bent on the Redoubt; the hooded Silent Ones; and more ghastly and malicious nightmares.

Yet there are those who venture out into the Night Lands.

Tales of valor and love against that dark backdrop. They involve a prophecy fulfilled exactly, a pair of brothers arguing about whether something will lead to disaster, a man in a scene from two memories conflated, a backstory like Orpheus with a twist, a woman who is tempted at a dance to forget her brother, and much more.

[Princessjay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interconnected novelettes set in the far future (22 million years away) where humanity is dying upon a darkening Earth.

This is not so much SF as weird-tale/horror with some science-ish trappings. As I read them, I cannot stop critiquing their likelihood and logic. For one thing, these stories are set millions of years before the world would end. A million years is a long time, guys! The entire length of human civilization is not a 10th that at present, and the events of even one thousand years away seem unfathomably distant. On an individual level, we can barely care about what will happen in a couple of decades. And yet these people are all miserable and deflated, bewailing their doom and behaving as though imminent destruction is just around the corner. Were I faced with the knowledge that humanity will end in 7 million years... I'll be living my life just as carefree as if there is no prophecy, thanks much.

And how little do these societies seem to change! although they jump aeons between each story. And, how little humans seem to change--physically, biologically--through out the aeons, despite their landscape and daily existence having changed drastically. OK, the 3rd story mentions multiple iterations of Mankind throughout the years, so there's that. But for all these different iterations, they seem to act and think much like previous versions. Always patriarchal, always and constantly consulting ancient books for lost knowledge, and full of the same rituals and moralities.

And, what even constitutes human anyway? Stories like these always make me think of Planet of the Apes. What, for example, would everything look like from the Silent Ones' perspective? Or the abhumans', who are cast aside or eliminated just because they have adapted to survive in the new darkness, intelligent, and yet designated as evil and cruel?

But then I slap myself upside the head, remind myself of the Dying Earth and Cthulhu and a host of similar stories, and returned to the stories themselves.

---

The Manichean nature of these forces bother me. An eternal evil aligned against mankind. Why? Because. A wild surmise: bc darkness hates the light, and death hates life? These dainty women with their hair tendrils.. fingernail scraping on chalkboard.

The second story is an iteration of mad Antigone, determined to bring her dead brother's body back to Thebes for a proper burial. I've never understood her insistence, and I do not understand the stubbornness of this chick either.

In the third story, an iteration of Aeneas bearing his aged father away from the destruction of Troy, one of these namelessly evil creatures tells the hero they intend to torture and degenerate humanity slowly, and will torment even its ghosts for eternity. Why? Just because. Feh.

---

It is entirely possible that, while I appreciate his writing capabilities very much, Wright and I have a fundamental disagreement of sensibilities.

---

For the last story, humans throughout the ages are resurrected some 15 billions years into the future, in the death throes or creation of the universe itself. They are on a ship falling at lightspeed toward the zero point, the Big Bang, with time breaking down and becoming so uncertain that quantum physic rules expand from micro-effects to macro. A lyrical imagining based on very hard science of how the end/beginning of the universe may look to our puny perspective.

This story I like the best, for it explains many hidden assumptions built into the previous 3 stories; provided a variety of vastly different perspectives and speech patterns that interacted with one another; and is the last mystery left to be solved, ever. Very fun set-up.

Of course, the ultimate resolution is way mushier, as these stories always are, and with religious overtones although with a twist and maybe sly dig, bc the forces of evil inserted a fake Biblical figure to fool the protagonists into believing in their original sin.. but it's more of a dig at orthodox religion than with the godhood itself. However, it does a good job of pulling all the Night Land lore together the pair of lovers in the original Hodgson book; reincarnation; all lovers reunite at the end of time, etc. The men are different incarnations of a single human spirit throughout the ages, each longing for his one true love, because that spirit persistently longs after his one true love (though why should marriage as social convention persist through out MILLIONS OF YEARS is a mystery to me), and through all the iteration of longing for her throughout the ages he is the seed that will remake the same world all over again. But with the Master Word he links instead with the spirit that loves and wishes good for humans, and the universe will now begin anew with the evil shut away in silence and resolve everything very neatly, even perfectly.

For this story alone, I shall add .5 STAR to the rating. 3.5 STARS, rounded up to 4.

[Wesley Morrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that simultaneously makes you want to give up on your own writing (because you know that you'll never, ever be this good) but also write even more (because you feel that inspired by what Wright pulls off). Any fan of H.P. Lovecraft or Gene Wolfe will devour this work, and then read it again and savor it. The line-by-line writing is gorgeous, and the novellas themselves are epic nightmares that somehow manage to stay grounded in very flawed, very believable human characters. "Tour de force" doesn't even begin to cover this book.

My only complaint is the large jump in time between the third and fourth novellas. I wanted to see what Wright would do with a certain period in the Night Land the earlier novellas had foreshadowed. Even so, this is still the best book I've read in years, and one that I'll be re-reading many times in the years to come.

[Jeromy Peacock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whoa. John C. Wright just might be the Tolkien of Science Fiction. Read this book as soon as possible, all the way, and to the end.

[Daniel Bensen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first story in this book is a work of art. I actually drew a sketch of Telemachos lying on the gray ash, surrounded by Silent Ones, one hand reaching toward a star. The other stories are worth reading, though repetitive. The fourth especially has scenes that are beat-for-beat copies of the first. "Silence of the Night" should have been folded into "Awake in the Night" to make a longer, deeper story. But anyway, I got my dark fantasy fix.

[Greg Meyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovecraft's worst nightmare. Humanity's last bastion slowly losing its ascendancy. Advanced technology, imperfectly understood. Grecian tragedy mingled with the doom of humanity. Malign intelligence bent on destruction. C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy without any hope, and with more moral dogma (and religious undertone) courtesy of Wright's hard-line Catholic convert mentality. The setting is amazing, but Wright didn't write that. The stories read like Lovecraft, only laced with more Conservative mindset. The stories are engrossing. Love the stories, love the setting, hate the author and his worldview. Really, though, the atmosphere of despair and resolve in the face of the inevitable cosmic horror makes up for any flaws.

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never read anything else by John C. Wright. I picked this up since I read "The Night Land" and was eager to read more stories set in the same universe, especially if they featured a slightly more contemporary style of writing than the original (Wright uses actual dialogue, for instance). All of the four stories are excellent, particularly the second and third.

I give this four stars out of five, if only because the setting is not Wright's own.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

The conclusion is priceless.

[Johan Haneveld · Rating 4 out of 5]

8,5 Just under five stars because the story structure became at places a bit repetitive (person goes out from the Last Redoubt unto the night lands to rescue someone) and the final story was a bit obtuse in the hard to follow dialogues. But apart from that this was a great book, that is a hommage to The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson and even manages to improve on that book. It can also be read on its own, as its references to the original novel are well explained in the text. In The Night Land the earth has been plunged in an era of total darkness for countless millennia, millions of years even. Life is almost extinct and inhuman and sometimes unitelligible powers stalk the barren lands. Humankind survives in a gigantic tower, seven miles tall, powered by the Earth Force and besieged by sinister beings. At its core though is a tale of love, as two lovers from our day and time find themselves reincarnated in the far future, but on other sides of the earth, as one of them lives in the mythical Second Redoubt, far away. It's a fascinating book filled with a dark imagination and images that will stay in the mind for a long time, but it's marred by a semi-archaic style, without dialogue, that makes it hard to get through. Wright takes what is interesting from this setting and improves on it in several ways. First he still uses a hightened tone of voice, but with dialogue and more dynamic action. Then he adds even more weird and fascinating details to life in the Redoubt and in the Night Land. He also thinks more about what's behind this society. Where some other writers try to reinterpret the Night Land is a scientific or mechanistic way, thus robbing the evil powers of their teeth, so to speak, Wright ruminates on the philosophy underneath it all. Why are the last men on earth besieged? Why do they reincarnate? What does it all lead to? He takes the story of The Last Redoubt farther into the future, adds a bit of fatalism, as the people in the Redoubt know when their edifice will fall, and in the final story takes the rays of hope that shine on the dark lands almost from beyond the universe and tells a story that encompasses all of space and time! There are truly harrowing images here, some beautiful twists and turns, different kinds of love explored, and some references to Lovecraft and other weird fiction authors. The final story is epic in scope, as I suggested, and like some other of Wrights books the main part is taken up by dialogue between characters from different times and different walks of life. It's full of science and imagination, but hard to follow. But I like having to put my mind to work, especially if it is blown in the process. As someone looking for a sense of 'awe' in my SF, I was awestruck by this collection. It's not for the faint of heart, but for those loving the original, or looking for some awe-inspiring mindbending weird SF/fantasy/horror this is powerful stuff. If SF is the literature of ideas there's no shortage of them here. I know Wright is politically on the far right in the USA and has some views I strongly disagree with, but still I could appreciate this book a lot (besides some throwaway lines where his views come through). In the end his thought on death, love, creation and purpose were inspiring to me.

[Grips · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an amazing book. John C Wright nails everything that makes a good story--the message most of all. His peculiarly efficient prose makes each sentence count for three, yet it stimulates a fecundity in the reader's imagination that no detail is lost and the action flows smoothly, vividly. Mr. Wright elegantly achieves what Cormac McCarthy never could.

His message is that of the triumph of Love, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, over that which is Not Of Us. In seemingly impossible, hopeless circumstances, Man's love and humanity abates the Malice of the Darkness, but not without great sacrifice.

John C Wright is a literary genius. I know now what it feels like to read a masterpiece in its popular infancy, before it becomes a classic and goes down in history.

[Douglas Summers-Stay · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Night Land is the distant future imagined by William Hope Hodgson in 1912. It is the end of the human race, long after the death of the sun, where all that remains of humanity and goodness lives in a great fortified pyramid called The Last Redoubt, beset by Elder Horrors from Beyond, giants, werewolves, The Silent Ones, slow moving sphinxes the size of mountains, and so forth. This book is a series of stories set in that land, mostly about people who journey out into the night to rescue loved ones. The end of the final story, with its reincarnation, travel through a black hole, and mysticism, recalls movies like 2001, Contact, and Interstellar.
John C. Wright's science fiction is heavily influenced by his Catholicism. The themes of hell and grace, sin and righteousness are flavored by his belief in absolute morality emanating from a supernatural god outside of time, and all that follows from that; and a scriptural sense of language and pacing that is at times rich and fascinating, and other times weird and boring. At times it feels more like Gnostic texts than science fiction. This book is deliberately written in an antiquated style-- if you've ever read any H.P. Lovecraft or Mary Shelley, there are similarities. In fact, The Dark Land itself was written as if it was a 17th century book, probably for the same reasons as The Faerie Queene or the King James Bible were written in older language.

[Avalonjohn44 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just about every reader fancies themselves, at some level, a writer (...maybe on day...). Every once in a great while one stumbles upon something of such talent, scope and vision that shatters those fancies, and John C Wright accomplished that with this book. This is not at all a bad thing, I did not come away from this sundering with anything other than a humbled awe.

This feat is an especially difficult thing to do when writing in a world built by another author (William Hope Hodgson 1912). And yet Wright did it. I admit that while it did take quite a while to read this book, it is because it made you stop and ponder. And wonder. It feeds and fuels the imagination like nothing in recent memory... There is love and dread and loss and victory in this strange science fiction/fantasy/horror story and I cannot describe it any better than that it is the best story I've read in 20 years.

John C Wright goes immediately in my tiny little collection of writers that truly moved me, keeping company with the likes of Robin Hobb, Steven Brust, Weis & Hickman, and Frank Herbert.

I can't wait to hunt down more of his books. Sadly they are difficult to find, which is absolutely Criminal.

[Lori]

Nope. Nope. I can't do it. A mainstream conservative like Orson Scott Card is one thing, but John C. Wright is absolutely vile. Just look at his blog. Milo Yiannopoulos had a guest column just last week and it is absolutely jaw-dropping. Seriously one of the worst things I've ever read. There is an ocean of cosmic horror and weird fiction out there and I simply cannot justify wasting any time on this trilby-tipping Christofascist.

[Mrmandias · Rating 5 out of 5]

If this book were written 50 years ago, it would be considered one of the classics. 50 years from now, if our civilization is still around, it will be.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frankly stunning. It's Chesterton meets Wolfe meets Lovecraft in Hodgson's Night Land setting.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another one I wish I could give six stars. A powerful, inspiring, and absorbing collection.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Series of short pieces. Didn't like it, not for me.

[Howardstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is not a traditional sci fi novel, and do not read it as such lest you be disappointed like I was the first time pondering it. Don't expect to find out the material mature, material origin, and the material demise of every entity, as well as the material origins of their motivations (presumably how they evolved into what we see in the book) so that you don't build up a false expectation and become disappointed like I was when material questions weren't answered. This is a book of love, of 4 love stories, the first about the love from one friend to another, the second about the love between sister and brother, the third father and son, and the fourth, finally, husband and wife, and ends with God's love "so bright". If judging this book as one with a spiritual message and little intended material one, I have no complaints, therefore 5 stars it is. I will be honest, it did not inspire me or give me goosebumps as other books have, particularly The Golden Age Trilogy by the same author, Wright. Awake in the Night Land was the first book I read with such a message, so I was not expecting it, nor was I looking for it. I was reading it like a sci fi book, waiting for all the great revelations, explanations, debates and dialogues which clear everything up, as a sci fi fan would, so my disappointed prior to figuring out what it was really about ruined the great feeling had by more learned readers than I. Additionally, the ending was overrated from a subjective POV because I cannot relate to the concept of God's love, so the significance just escaped me.

Subjectively (by emotional impact of the book and how much I personally got from it), 3.5 stars, but objectively, 5. Facts don't care about feelings, libtard, therefore I'll publish the objective score.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first 3 stories are incredible and everything any fan of the original Night Lands could ever ask for. If this collection was limited to those 3, it would be more or less perfect. Unfortunately, Wright over extends himself with an attempt at an ending to the world of the Night Lands in the 4th book. It unravels quickly into a semi-didactic Into-to-Philosophy Socratic back and forth between characters. On top of that, he dips into some of the Scifi tropes he's used in other works and the effect is flat and awkward. The story trends upwards after some self-indulgent existential wandering to what feels like a justified, penultimate conclusion... only to slip at the finish line with Wright's personal Christian beliefs making a rude and clunky appearance (C.S. Lewis, Wright is not). Still, when the collection is good, it's so damn good that it's still far better than most genre fiction published in the last twenty years.

[Vladimir Ivanov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Сборник из четырех коротких повестей в сеттинге "Ночной Земли" Джона Ходжсона. Первые три идеально выдержаны в духе оригинала (слава богу, в отличие от Ходжсона, Райт излагает нормальным современным языком, без архаизмов, с диалогами), и если бы сборник ограничился ими, то получил бы заслуженную твердую пятерку.

Увы, Райт не сдержался и написал четвертую повесть, The Last of All Suns, которая, во-первых, сама по себе очень занудная, а во-вторых, в ней никак не обходится без Господа Нашего Иисуса Христа, который в финале спасает из ада Ночной Земли всех людей, открывших свои сердца и впустивших себе в душу Его божественную любовь и бла блабла блабла бла бла.

Итоговая оценка - 4/5, но если сдержаться и просто не читать последнюю повесть, то имеем абсолютно четкие пять баллов.

[Tarash_bulba · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good collection of short stories about a setting that I love, the nightmarish Lovecraftian horror world of the Night Land.
The first two short stories were great while the third was good but felt a little rushed and somewhat incomplete. The 4th tale, although it brings closure and some answers, it partially dispels the mystery of unknowable cosmic horrors of the preceding shorts as well as the original Night Land by Hodgson.
Still, it's definitely a read worth your while.

[Maxwell Edison · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the history of getting it, john C wright got it. He got it in spades. I cannot imagine a better follow-up to the original book then this. All the stories utilize the setting to tell classically beautiful stories.
Somehow Wright manages to capture the human spirit and thug on your emotions much better then any modern writer.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wildly imaginative for its time, the idea of the last remnants of humanity living on a dead earth long after the sun has burnt out is totally original to me and sadly compelling. The book is somewhat disjointed, and has spelling/grammar mistakes, and departs from the cosmic horror genre of its original author, but overall extremely enjoyable and a quick read.

[Drewms64 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost 5 stars but didn't care for the last story that much.

[Courtney Carlson · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing and style were quite good, but too many of the stories it's hard to tell exactly what's going on. Not my type of book.