The Collected Fiction, Vol. 4: The Night Land and Other Perilous Romances

The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson #4

by William Hope Hodgson

The fourth of a five volume set collecting all of Hodgson's published fiction. Each volume contains one of Hodgson's novels, along with a selection of thematically-linked short fiction. Introduction by Jeremy Lassen The Night Land # The Captain of the Onion Boat # Smugglers # The Girl with the Grey Eyes # Kind, Kind and Gentle Is She # A Timely Escape A Note On The Texts

Genres: Horror, Fantasy, Fiction, Short Stories, Collections, Science Fiction, Weird Fiction

530 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2005

About the author

William Hope Hodgson was an English author. He produced a large body of work, consisting of essays, short fiction, and novels, spanning several overlapping genres including horror, fantastic fiction, and science fiction. Early in his writing career he dedicated effort to poetry, although few of his poems were published during his lifetime. He also attracted some notice as a photographer and achieved some renown as a bodybuilder. Hodgson served with the British Army durng World War One. He died, at age 40, at Ypres, killed by German artillery fire.

Reviews

[Michael Battaglia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to give Hodgson credit, because having now read each of his four novels its interesting to see how did he not only vary his subject matter and try to find as many possibilities within his own limitations as he could, but he was gung-ho on radically changing his style for each work. "Boats of the 'Glen Carrig'" is an archaically written but fairly straightforward tale of survival with some stray horror elements. "House on the Borderland" is written in a more contemporary style but is flat out nuts at times. "The Ghost Pirates" trades the cosmic feel for actual creeping doom while eschewing the stilted old fashioned style that characterizes his work at times.

And then there's "The Night Land". And while you think that reading four volumes of novels and short stories will prepare you "The Night Land", the truth is, absolutely nothing will. As mentioned in previous reviews, there's some debate as to whether the written order matches the published order and with evidence sometimes suggesting what's oldest is newest and so on, its possible that this is his first novel despite being the last published. Even so, the style and subject matter come almost completely out of left field. It's SF, it's horror, its fantasy, its adventure, its a love story, its written in the style of ye olden dais but meant for the young, its all of these things.

It's also about four hundred pages and takes up the vast majority of volume four, so when attempting to review this one, you can't sidestep it. It's all about "The Night Land" or its nothing.

The story itself is actually both straightforward and fairly bizarre. After a brief prologue where a guy meets the girl of his dreams and loses her, the action shifts ahead millions of years into the future where the sun has gone out and our hero (either the initial narrator brought forward or his descendant) is living in the Last Redoubt, a haven against the increasing hostility of a dying world. Before long the narrator has become aware of another Redoubt that has run into some trouble and races off to rescue them, in the process not quite succeeding but getting a nice consolation prize in the form of the reincarnation of his lost love. Which could be the answer to his all prayers except 1) they're nowhere near safety and have to walk back through a vast land where literally everything is trying to kill them, 2) his lady love, while loyal, is not exactly Xena, Warrior Princess. But she has nice feet, which the narrator takes pains to point out, again and again.

For a lot of people you're going to be in a situation where you may admire and even greatly respect what the story is trying to do even as you find the execution of said story to be completely teeth clenching and grating. Because, for whatever reason, Hodgson decided to write this story in not-at-all-trendy-then and still-not-trendy-now 17th century style, which can take a lot of of getting used to because his level of commitment to this style is nothing short of Olympian and it readily makes "Boats of the "Glen Carrig'" already not the easiest prose in the world to parse, read like a "See Spot Run" book. For me this would have been more of an issue except for one thing: I've already made it through Eddison's "The Worm Ouroboros" which is written in a similarly eye crossing style and depending on what order you read them in, it can seem like one is an homage to the other, or at least an attempt to one-up the other (for the record Hodgson's was published first, in 1912, with the all devouring worm book coming along in the 20s). But going into this cold is going to take an adjustment, one the story is not going to wait around for you to do.

What makes this fascinating to me is not only Hodgson's ability to depict the sheer feel of a dying earth through the eyes of someone with ancient but to imbue the land with a barely understandable strangeness that borders on touching some collectively unconscious logic to power all the imagery. The sights, the giant pyramid of the Redoubt, the Night Lands themselves, the Watchers, the Humpt Men and the other various monsters they encounter, its all vividly detailed and there are many moments when the all enveloping waves of prose that crash down upon you serve to completely immerse you in an alien landscape. The closest comparison I can make, at least on a visual level, is Gustave Verbeek's early 20th century strip "The Terrors of the Tiny Tads" where a group of nameless kids wander through strange terrain encountering all manner of very unsettling beasts, depicted in a manner that isn't adorable at all but mostly very eerie. That's the feel you get from this, a land that is dying but not quite dead, littered with the remains of a past that is so far ahead its still the future, and yet possessed of enough verve to go out of its way to kill you.

If this was the sole foundation the book was built upon it would be pretty memorable despite the off-putting prose. However, in either a nod to his sentimental side or just a desire to be very, very contrary, Hodgson goes and decides to make his nice adventure fantasy tale into a flat out romance. And while its not a bodice ripper (sadly), its pretty much from the onset that this narrator is built for wooing across the ages as no man has ever wooed before. From the getgo his thoughts are consumed with his lost love and once he seems to find her in the body of another, all heck breaks loose and by that I mean the soppy sentimentality of the last fifteen or so minutes of "Love, Actually" taken to the hundredth power and distilled to such a concentrated potency that it could make stones fall in love with other stones, that could make "All You Need is Love" seem like a vaguely heartfelt grocery list, that could ensure every meaningful wedding vow written in the world when combined has the melodic complexity of an improvisational song banged out on a child's toy xylophone. It could give diabetes to sugar itself. It is, in its way, one of the most sustained and ultimate expressions of love and devotion ever expressed in fantastic literature.

However, it is also like when your two good friends first start dating and become one inseparable organism of "wuv" that has to pour its gooey good times all over you in every single encounter no matter how mundane and shower completely single you at all times with paeans to how amazing love can be. The first few times, you find it cute. After that you tolerate it with a fixed smile. After THAT it crosses the line into sheer tedium and you begin researching how you can sign them up for the next manned Mars mission.

That's sort of what happens here. You experience the kind of love you wish would happen to you someday. But its not happening to you and so you find its constant reminders extraordinarily grating. But it soldiers on anyway with tiny hearts in its eyes, not at all aware of what its doing to you. And so you carry on, slowly seething. Hodgson was going to make this a romance and by gum, did he succeed. The question is what did he succeed in doing.

Prior to the narrator finding his long lost love, the prose takes on a near lulling rhythm not that far from watching a slew of episodes of "Mr Roger's Neighborhood" all in a row. He gets up, he gives you a near hour by hour recap of what he's doing, including telling you every single time he eats a food tablet, as if the book is attempting to have you experience the plot in real-time. Every so often he gets attacked. Once he rediscovers his dream girl, those rhythms don't go away but we are treated to page after page of description as they tease and bicker and kiss each other, as he repeatedly calls her Mine Own and obsesses over the parts of her body that drive him relatively wild (this being the early 1900s), namely her hair and her feet. The latter seems to be a particular obsession as we're treated to pages of description as he holds her feet, rubs ointment on her feet, she teases him with her feet until you get the impression that you've stumbled unknowingly upon a future where the currency is erotic fetishes. If the book was two hundred pages it would be cutely annoying, at four hundred pages it comes close to maddening, so cloyingly romantic it insists on being.

Yet. While the sentimentality has, dare I say, both feet in standard romantic hero traditions, there's an honesty to the gooiness that raises it somewhat above mere artifice and attempting to emulate some Victorian style. While they remain lovingly devoted to each other like a bad SNL sketch that's run about five minutes too long, there's enough hints of personality conflicts that give it some dimension beyond people making doe eyes at each other.

And believe it or not, it does come together in a satisfying fashion. The introduction to the collection makes a number of apologies for the story but does point out that the gradual accretion of the stilted prose and the romance and the strange setting all add up to something oddly memorable and while partway through the story I didn't see how that was possible, the truth is, it does. By the time we get to the climax we're invested in these ridiculous people in this bizarre world and the combination of heart on its sleeve storytelling and epic (and near tragic) circumstances lends the closing narrative a power that it might not have achieved if he had written it in a normal fashion, one not so hysterically beholden to romantic ideals.

Whether that conclusion will be worth the previous four hundred pages is up to the individual reader's tolerance. I wound up being glad that I read the book and whether that comes from a honest appreciation of the story's aims or simply trying to make myself feel better for the hours slogging through it is a question I may look into my soul in the years to come and never satisfactorily answer. But I did leave the story with much more fondness for its archaic sense of style than I felt perhaps halfway through, proof that stories, like that annoying couple you find yourself friends with, can sometimes win you over through relentless charm and sincerity. I don't know if it counts as innovative but if you name another pure romance set against the backdrop of a crumbling earth millions of years into the future that was written before this one, you're a better seeker of obscure reading material than I am. This one makes a case for being in a category all by itself.

Given how much space "The Night Land" takes up, its hard to believe there's room for other stories, but the collection makes space for six more romances, all told much more conventionally and not carrying a fraction of the ambition that makes up the behemoth in the front of the book. All of them have a sentimental streak but not are quite as cloying as his larger tale (the first one "The Captain of the Onion Boat" comes close) and for the most part read like his normal stories but with an added romance angle in them to go along with the plot. In that sense they're quite charming because Hodgson was a good and steady writer and when he clips the lovey-dovey stuff with a more solid plot (both "The Smugglers" and "In the Wailing Gully" work quite as well as adventure tales) the combination of capable men and women sorting through an issue while falling in love on the side remains nicely readable. When the balance tips more toward "aww" things don't quite get as strong ("The Girl With the Grey Eyes" and "Kind, Kind, and Gentle Is She" despite the latter having a pretty intense action sequence) but none of them are outright terrible. They exist as both palette cleansers and more conventional tales to bring you back down to earth after the imagination ride that is "The Night Land". The collection rises and falls based on your perception of that tale and all the rest pales in comparison, for better or for worse.

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fourth in Night Shade's five-volume collection of Hodgson's fiction. Unsurprisingly, the bulk of this volume is taken up by his monumental weird novel The Night Land, a book that's famously epic in scope, extremely influential, and almost unreadable.

The story begins (as was the style at the time; q.v. The Worm Ouroboros) with a framing story; in this case, our nameless hero and narrator, at some point in the near past (Elizabethan England? Something in that vicinity seems likely) meets and falls in love with a local lady named Mirdath. (And when she spurns him, he stalks her until she changes her mind, as also was the style at the time.) And they fall in love, a great love for the ages, until she dies in childbirth and he becomes a Dark Lord of the Sith, more machine than man mopes around incessantly until (here endeth the framing story) he is catapulted by his dreams into the impossibly distant future.

And what a future it is! The Sun has at this point burnt itself out (hence The Night Land) and the last surviving remnants of humanity dwell in a giant metal pyramid called the Last Redoubt, sustained and protected by the Earth Current, but beset on all sides by Terrible Powers and Entities that roam the darkness, just waiting.

And our hero (still nameless) begins to receive mental impressions from someone who appears to be his Mirdath reborn? Although she doesn't realize it herself? And she (with very small number of other survivors) dwells in a long-forgotten Lesser Redoubt, which is about to fall to the aforementioned Terrible Powers and Entities.

So what is Our Hero to do but strap on his Diskos (a weapon of terrible puissance) and his armor, stock up on food tablets and dehydrated water, and set out on an epic journey through the wonders and terrors (mostly terrors) of the Night Land to save his One True Love.

And it's ultimately frustrating because there's some truly great stuff here, but Hodgson makes it as difficult as possible to get to the good bits, partially by having Our Hero describe, in varying degrees of detail, pretty much every single step of his journey to the Lesser Redoubt and back, but mostly because Hodgson also decided to couch the entire thing in completely insufferable and almost unreadable faux-archaic prose.

For example:

Before me ran the Road Where The Silent Ones Walk; and I searched it, as many a time in my earlier youth had I, with the spy-glass; for my heart was always stirred mightily by the sight of those Silent Ones.

And, presently, alone in all the miles of that night-grey road, I saw one in the field of my glass—a quiet, cloaked figure, moving along, shrouded, and looking neither to right nor left. And thus was it with these beings ever. It was told about in the Redoubt that they would harm no human, if but the human did keep a fair distance from them; but that it were wise never to come close upon one. And this I can well believe.

And so, searching the road with my gaze, I passed beyond this Silent One, and past the place where the road, sweeping vastly to the South-East, was lit a space, strangely, by the light from the Silver-fire Holes. And thus at last to where it swayed to the South of the Dark Palace, and thence Southward still, until it passed round to the Westward, beyond the mountain bulk of the Watching Thing in the South—the hugest monster in all the visible Night Lands. My spy-glass showed it to me with clearness—a living hill of watchfulness, known to us as The Watcher Of The South. It brooded there, squat and tremendous, hunched over the pale radiance of the Glowing Dome.

Which should give you an example of the highs and lows of trying to actually read the goddamned thing.

Oh, and when Our Hero does, in fact, rescue Mirdath and they set upon their return journey, the whole thing gets overlaid with cloying, wretchedly sentimental romantical bits, just for good measure.

So do I recommend it? Well, um .... It depends.

(As an aside, if you want to see somebody who can successfully write an entire epic in cod-archaic prose, look no further than the previously mentioned Worm Ouroboros.)

The last quarter or so of the book is taken up with a handful of stories, all of which are romances (in the boy-meets-girl sense) to one degree or another, some with a whiff of a supernatural element or some drawing on Hodgson's own nautical background. And it's nice enough to have them here to round things out, but they're anything but essential.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm reviewing _The Night Land_ here, which is the bulk of this edited volume. The story seems to have fewer errors than the Dover edition I read last time, though it is difficult to know for sure given the deliberately rambling, archaic style that is adopted by Hodgson's questing male narrator.

There is so much that is fascinating about this book--the threateningly vague threat of the "House of Silence" being perhaps the most fascinating--but so much that is annoying. It is way too long, and the vision of love that the book promotes at length becomes fairly nauseating by the time the book is over. Still, I just can't keep my readerly attention away from something so transparently bizarre. I'm not going to say much more here, other than that I will be including some discussion of this in my book project.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

A hero's odyssey, written in intentionally archaic style. The battle scenes and the hero's pining devotion carry the reader through a less-than-pleasant journey.

[Luke Bishop · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Night Land is perhaps overlong and repetitive, which is not helped at all by the intentionally antiquated writing style. However, the world-building and descriptions are quite effective and evocative, and despite its fantastical setting contains some very moving meditations and comments on Love. The other handful of stories contained herein are not particularly memorable, but some, such as "The Smugglers," are still effective short stories.