The House on the Borderland
William Hope Hodgson
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| (The cover is not mine.) |
Originally published in 1908, it is a horror novel that was just short enough to keep me reading to the end even though I was more than once tempted to break off.
I'd not had any idea what to expect when I started it, and can't remember why I downloaded it in the first place (certainly would not have done so, had it been offered as a horror story).
I can't recommend it, even though - according to its wikipedia article, which is here - it has been highly praised by other writers, Terry Pratchett (of Discworld fame) even calling it the "Big Bang" in his private universe as a reader and writer of fantasy and science fiction.
The story is quickly told: Two young men go on a hiking and fishing holiday in a remote area in Ireland. During a long hike they come across the ruins of a house in the middle of a large overgrown garden which gives them a creepy feeling. Within the ruins, they find a hand-written account of the last person to inhabit the house.
They take the badly damaged manuscript back to their camp site and read it together, learning of strange and terrible goings-on at the spot that made them feel so uneasy.
We read the manuscript along with them, and the book ends with the young men deciding never to set foot again in the strange garden and ruins of the house, although they do not say aloud that they believe that what the former inhabitant has described really happened.
For the reader, nothing is explained, everything is merely described. There is no "solution", no big revelation at the end; we are left to our own devices as to whether we want to believe the account as a faithful description of true happenings or of hallucinations of a lonely man.
Of course, I read what wikipedia had to say about the book and its author, who was completely unknown to me. A very handsome man and prolific writer, he married at the age of 35 and died at the age of 40, fighting in WWI. His widow worked to keep his books in print and even had some of his works published posthumously for the first time. When she died decades later, her sister took over.
Learning about the author's short life was more interesting than the book itself, I must say.
William died in April 1918.
ReplyDeleteAt the fourth battle of Ypres which British soldiers called Wipers
(Far far from Wipers, I want to be : Sung in the film Oh ! What A Lovely War).
Thank you for telling me about him.
I regret not reading enough novels on World War I. Only a few.
Barbusse's Le Feu. Junger's In Stahlgewittern.
Ford's Parade's End. William March's Company K, which is polyphonic.
A Farewell To Arms. All Quiet on the Western Front. Three Comrades - Dos Passos.
Her Privates We by Frederic Manning, admired by Hemingway.
And a study of Henry Williamson on WWI.
JB Priestley never wrote one though he was buried alive for hours.
CS Lewis saw his sergeant shot before his eyes and the shell went into Lewis's back.
My mother (born 1917) lived to 97 and remembers a shellshocked man who stood at
the street corner holding a white handkerchief, a handsome man who never married.
Would William Hope Hodgson have written a book ?
Oh ! What A Lovely War - Ending Sequence. YouTube.
Len Deighton (producer, screenwriter) removed his name from the credits.
Who knows what William would have written, had he survived the war? He would have certainly come back a different person, as did the young soldier Paul in Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front". I have read and reviewed this book here on my blog:
Deletehttps://librarianwithsecrets.blogspot.com/2015/02/read-in-2015-7-im-westen-nichts-neues.html
Well, I don't like horror stories and my library doesn't have it anyway so I'm glad to skip it!
ReplyDeleteI would have skipped it too, Ellen, had I had any clue about the book when I downloaded it originally!
DeleteIt sounds intriguing, but not the sort of story I usually enjoy. Some of the free books are rather unsettling.
ReplyDeleteThis one is a free book because its considered a "classic", not like many of the other freebies I read that are made so that the reader is enticed to buy the rest of the series.
DeleteYou can find out almost everything there is to know about the story without having to read the book simply by reading the wikipedia article I have linked to.