One of the novel’s more effective passages has the Recluse exploring the cavernous area below his house-the Pit-and running smack into the swine things. Vicious swine creatures resembling the one seen in Plain of Silence are a constant in whatever reality the Recluse inhabits. Thus begins a pattern of sorts that sees the Recluse embarking on incomprehensibly vast sojourns through time and space, only to be abruptly thrust back to his point of entry. The Recluse ends up back where he started, in the house with his dog and sister. The account begins in eye-opening fashion, with the Recluse visualizing himself leaving the Earth and alighting on a distant planet where a house very much like the one he currently resides in is situated upon a “Plain of Silence,” and attacked by a hideous swine monster. It’s the nightmarish reminiscence of “the Recluse,” an old man living in a sinister house with his loyal mutt Pepper and grown sister. Like much of Hodgson’s fiction (notably the epic NIGHT LAND), it’s presented as a first person manuscript recovered by a third party. The contents of the manuscript itself form the bulk of the novel, a ceaseless stream of descriptive prose with no dialogue or subplots to break the spell. The circumstances of its retrieval, and those who affect it, are of little consequence.

That manuscript is discovered in a set of ruins set atop a vast cavern. THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND is seen by some commentators as a psychedelic take on several key themes of THE TIME MACHINE. It can also be taken as a horrific predecessor to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, or simply an incomparably strange scare fest with a cosmic bent.

Wells, and T HE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND is seen by some commentators as a psychedelic take on several key themes of THE TIME MACHINE. The late William Hope Hodgson was a colleague of H.G. One of the true classics of the supernatural, this bizarre novel can almost be viewed as avant-garde sci-fi. By WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON (Grafton 1908/90)

The house on the borderland