![]() ![]() The book is ostensibly a manuscript found by a pair of friends on a fishing expedition in the wilds of Ireland in 1877, exactly the kind of framing device that is very common to fantastic fiction of this era. The House on the Borderland holds surprises for a modern audience, as it is at once written in the sort of style one would expect from a turn-of-the-century author, yet with a pace and frantic energy somewhat at odds with the prose. In 1918 he died at the age of 40 - another life cut short by the Great War. It was Hodgson’s second novel, published at age thirty, and over the next ten years he would publish further works of supernatural fiction, sea-adventures, and another major work of cosmic horror, The Night Land. And that influence cannot be more apparent than in The House on the Borderland, a short, strange novel that is nothing less than a minor masterpiece of weird fiction. These days, English author William Hope Hodgson is nearly always mentioned, if he is mentioned at all, as an early influence on H.P. ![]()
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