The House on the Borderland
by William Hope Hodgson · first published 1946
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The House on the Borderland is a supernatural horror novel by William Hope Hodgson. He went beyond the existing ghost story and gothic molds, synthesizing a new cosmic horror that made a huge impact on later writers of weird tales, notably H. P. Lovecraft. The two gentlemen Tonnison and Berreggnog head to a village in Ireland for a week's fishing. There they discover the ruins of a strange house and the diary of the house's former occupant, the words on its torn pages hinting at an evil far beyond anything that has existed in this world before.
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I liked this note on Hodgson's The House on the Borderland: The original print edition of this novel contains a pathological number of commas—so much so that a modern reader would find them distracting at best and plainly ungrammatical at worst. The editors…
on “Standard Ebooks: Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced” ↗House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodges. Very atmospheric horror I read to read Lord of the Rings every year but I pretty much got to memorise the whole thing and it became a drag
on “Ask HN: Which book would you pick to re-read for the rest of your life?” ↗Lord of the Rings, House on the Borderland, Pilgrims Progress, Gulliver's Travels and the complete works of H.P. Lovecraft
on “Ask HN: What book have you re-read 3x or more?” ↗…Living Dead is inspired by the 1954 novel I Am Legend, which is based on vampire mythology. And although it's probably not a direct inspiration, it also reminds me of the chapter in the 1908 novel The House on the Borderland where the swine-things attack the house.
on “A Fistful of Tropes” ↗Uh, you parsed it right. He named it, but the microgenre known as "Dying Earth" would most recognizably start some decades before with The Time Machine and the somewhat lesser-known The House on the Borderland. It wasn't a new idea but he more or less summed it up in a succinct manner with an obvious name, then placed multiple stories within a timeline with some overlapping features, a bit like Varley's "Eight…
on “The Eldritch Roots of Dungeons and Dragons” ↗