A romance of the far future, in which humankind has relocated
underground, where it is beset by monsters from another dimension--but
love leads on.
In the far future, humankind's survivors huddle below Earth's frozen
surface in a pyramidal fortress-city that, for centuries now, has been
under siege by loathsome "Ab-humans," enormous slugs and spiders, and
malevolent "Watching Things" from another dimension. When our unnamed
protagonist receives a telepathic distress signal from a woman whom (in
a previous incarnation) he'd once loved, he sallies forth on an
ill-advised rescue mission--into the fiend-haunted Night Land!
"Like certain rare dreams," C. S. Lewis wrote of Hodgson's masterpiece,
The Night Land can give "sensations we never had before and enlarge
our conception of the range of possible experience." H. P. Lovecraft
agreed that this is "one of the most potent pieces of macabre
imagination ever written."
William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) was an English poet, sailor,
bodybuilder, and weird fiction pioneer whose horror, fantastic, and
proto-sf novels--in addition to The Night Land--include The Boats of
the "Glen Carrig" (1907), The House on the Borderland (1908), and
The Ghost Pirates (1909). He also wrote stories in the Sargasso Sea
series, the Captain Gault series, and a series about the occult
detective Carnacki.
