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The House on the Borderland
10-08-2014, 01:15 PM (This post was last modified: 10-08-2014 01:15 PM by Old Dwarf.)
Post: #1
The House on the Borderland
I've stocked up on some Mythos reading for October which included 2 books that Lovecraft admired that were pre Mythos but
had elements that influenced Lovecraft & his Mythos. The Willows by Blackwood ,which fits fairly firmly into the Mythos &
The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson written in 1908 which is more of a stretch.

Hodgson prose doesn't exactly flow naturally but he can pull off some really creepy scenes. You can really see the story
elements that have come to define the Mythos. Mysterious derelict house, the telling of the tale through a manuscript,
the "abrupt there at the door" finish, dimensional rifts & horrific beings.

The book starts in typical Mythos fashion 2 guys on a fishing trip in a remote section of Ireland come upon a mysterious
section of woods with the ruins of a great house They find an old manuscript in the ruins & then flee the strange
sense of wrongness/evil of the location. Back at their camp the begin to read the manuscript aloud. It proves
to be the dairy of the houses owner where he records the strange happenings in the house. From there the manuscript
becomes the book & the 2 men fade away.

The dairy starts off with a real Mythos flavor strange noises the odd Pit at the back of the property, strange
beings, the exploration of under ground caverns the growing sense of dread , out of body experiences. Then it falls into
H.G. Wells Time Machine and your sucked into page after page of descriptions of rapidly passing years, decades, centuries /
Eons ( think of the scene in the move The Time Machine where the guy is setting in the Sled & watches the store
window rapidly change into the far future) . After all this it drops back to the Mythos again where he's back in the House
with strange happenings & creatures.

The manuscript ends abruptly with the famous cut off word ending. The story now returns to the 2 men who get a
little of the local history of the house & they bail out back to civilization.

For me the book has some really creepy passages but the trip into the earth's far future & death of the solar system just
got on my nerves after several pages. I found it very interesting to see the material Lovecraft obviously adopted into
his own writing style. I did not overly enjoy the read but I'm glad I read it.

OD

Sighing like the night wind and sobbing like the rain,—
Wailing for the lost one that comes not again:
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