The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson
(The MIT Press, 2023)
Reviewed by Duncan Lawie
Introduction by Eric Davis
There are influential books which are now rarely read. Some have slipped out of print through luck or complexities of ownership. Some, despite their influence, are barely readable; The Night Land falls into this category. When I noticed this new edition was abridged, I wondered whether I should be seeking a complete edition, but within pages of starting to read, I was grateful for any word excised. The prose is clotted; the story wearing; the dull detail of the journey, of eating and drinking each six hours—or discussing exactly why our narrator has delayed—is exhausting:
Yet, in truth, as I do now have knowledge, it was the North that drew; and I do seem to make a great telling about this little matter; but how else shall I show to you mine inward mind, and the lack of knowledge and likewise the peculiar knowings that did go to the making of that time, and the Peoples thereof, which is but to say the same thing twice over.
Still, there is a great imagination at work here. Published in 1908, the story is set millions of years hence, when the sun is extinguished and the last surviving millions of humanity live in a huge pyramid. Each level is a city, with all the levels interconnected as part of a shared society, powered by the Earth-Current. This same power creates a protective circuit around the pyramid which keeps the monsters of the Night Land from entering.
Over the course of many pages, the landscape of the Night Land is described in detail: the Watching Thing, The Place Where The Silent Ones Are Never, the Valley of The Hounds, The Lights of the Quiet City and many other places and things which horrify by their sheer capitalisations. And then, our narrator, uniquely skilled in Night-Hearing through the power of his ‘brain-elements’, communicates with a maiden in a distant place, and discovers that there are more humans in a Lesser Redoubt. A group of 500 Youths goes out to find them and are set upon by Giant Brutes. They, and their subsequent attempted rescuers, are killed or, worse, consumed.
Eventually, our narrator sets out on his own, armed and armoured, and following a compass and vague directions heads across the dark land, amidst its many horrors, whether a Grey Man, a sand coloured four armed Yellow Man, a Sound, ‘secret and horrid Doorways in the Night’ or monstrous slug-things. He stumbles in the dark and cold and approaches the light and warmth of fire holes with caution. At times, there are great pale lights or volcanoes. He eats and sleeps.
When, finally, he reaches the vicinity of his beloved, he discovers that an Evil Force has entered the Lesser Redoubt and he creeps pitifully away, only to discover his Maid by their ability to communicate through their brain-elements. The gender relations seem regressive, even for the time of publication, though he pays great attention to bathing her ‘dainty and pretty feet’. Only she, of all those people, can be saved. The descriptions of the sound of running feet and death in the dark is powerful; as is his death battle with one of the creatures who has torn a maid in half.
It is not surprising that the cover quotations come from H.P. Lovecraft and China Mieville. The mangled pseudo-archaic writing shows all the hamfistedness of Lovecraft without his purple prose; the imagination within shows the flair of Mieville. The introduction shows that even Lovecraft found it verbose and repetitious, but, while noting its flaws, Eric Davis is generally kinder to the book, placing it within the great span of speculative fiction. Davis also provides a useful summary of the material removed, leaving me grateful both that the story itself is more rounded than this abridgement and that I didn’t have to read it in its entirety myself.
Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.