Jesse’s Reviews > The Night Land and Other Perilous Romances: The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson, Volume 4 > Status Update

It also has a really weird relationship dynamic between the MC and the woman he risks his soul to rescue, Naani, who—once she starts to feel less imperiled while they’re in the Country of the Seas, a Land That Time Forgot or Rediscovered, she is constantly pushing his boundaries until he believes that he is forced to whip her with her belt. Someone pointed out that there is a weird undertone to the piece because of the chivalric modesty that the MC has at all times, always concerned as to his eternal love’s “maidenhood” with regards to himself.

Anyway, this chonker is 400 freakin pages long. It is the antithesis of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror and to a basic extent I believe that Hodgson always demonstrated in much of his prose a sort of antithesis to Lovecraft. HP seemed to believe that the human mind when confronted with horrible terrors would inevitably snap, that people were not so resilient. Hodgson explored the full spectrum; his characters actually underwent the ego death that comes from confronting cosmic horror and while he alludes to the idea that people could be spiritually annihilated when confronting these concepts—that is what the House of Silence appears to be, a force that can assault the minds of people and convince them of the meaningless of their continued existence.

The general theory of Hodgson’s horror is that all of these terrors are better withstood with like-minded company, and it is even better to weather with someone that you Love with a capital L because this book is full of treatises on relationship dynamics and the power of Love, all obscured through Hodgson’s affected prose.

There are some visionary elements in here among all of the other stuff. When the couple is traveling, Naani has a remembrance of another past-life somewhere between the 1700s and the now, where the earth’s revolution had slowed and humanity was contained within moving car-cities that were staying out of the line of the sun. This is a character moment for the MC, who for a brief moment is panicked over the fact that there is a past life that she has had in which he was not also with her.

They explore it to some degree and settle in on the idea that, while they are fated soulmates, they don’t always arrive to be together in every given epoch.

The ending is great. They foolishly move close to the House of Silence and for whatever reason it is able to affect her but has no power whatsoever over him. The implication is that X is so single-minded in his mission because his entire quest is centered around getting Naani back to the Redoubt whereas she is carrying the trauma of the annihilation of the Lesser Redoubt, including the subsequent month of living in fear in the other Night Land and the gruesome fate of the broken human beings who are merely evading death there, as well as experiencing a constant repeating death of her own.

There is the death of Naani’s life as it had existed in the Redoubt, with her parents and brothers; there is the death of Naani the single, fey woman, occurring during the journey through the Land of the Seas, as she comes to truly embody her as the soulmate of X; there is the constant death of the Naani who is frequently experiencing new and horrifying as well as wondrous experiences on the road, annihilating and reconstructing her sense of being; and there is the literal “death” of Naani as she is struck by the House of Silence. All of this is wrapped up in an existential as well as literal rebirth.

It’s just so much, and Naani isn’t fortified in the same way that X is, whatever the reason. I would like to think it is because Naani is just a more complex character, which makes her vulnerable to the House of Silence. It’s all so much to take in, beginning with the destruction of the Lesser Redoubt, that the House can operate on her and just kill her will to live. In the story we get our cop out, here, as Naani is actually in a sort of suspended animation, a silencing of her soul that is renewed when her body is brought to the legendary Earth Current. I really thought that we were going for a stoic, bittersweet ending and when she woke up from her death dream I was SUPERCHARGED.