Before the writings of the Mythos circle, there was William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, published in 1912. While this novel might nominally belong to the “Dying Earth” subgenre of science fantasy, it’s actually among the finest cosmic horror pieces I’ve ever read.

But you have to be intrepid. There are terrible obstacles to overcome. To enumerate:

• It’s a 200,000-word novel, which translates to about 800 pages for a paperback edition.
• There are no dialogues, as the novel pretends to be a handwritten account for posterity.
• The novel is written in a—wildly fictitious—seventeenth-century patois, which takes itself very seriously. (Not like Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, which, even though it’s linguistically on much more solid ground, makes fun of itself as a period impostor all the time.)

Sounds intriguing? Wait, that’s just the beginning of your perilous reading quest!

There’s a “frame story” featuring the courting, marriage, and death of the protagonist’s “Beloved Lady,” which, let’s put it that way, consists of male-centered tedium that Lovecraft, in his 1927 “Supernatural Horror in Literature” essay, calls “a tendency toward conventionally sentimental conceptions of the universe.” (The above scare quotes around the term “frame story” are meant to indicate that it’s not really a frame story, as references to it get scarcer and scarcer over time until it’s dropped wholesale and never picked up again. Which, certainly, is for the better.) And later, in the far future, large passages describing the relationship between the reincarnated protagonist and his equally reincarnated (but not explicitly remembering) Lady are particularly insufferable (“conventionally sentimental” again, if you want to call it that, but this time on roaring steroids).

But all that shouldn’t keep you! Or—Cthulhu forbid—push you to reach for one of the abbreviated or rewritten versions instead. No, you have to go through all that to let The Night Land shine. There are creatures that can be fought and entities that can only be avoided. And the latter, in particular, are cosmic horror at its best—authentically imaginative, utterly incomprehensible, and incredibly frightening. What’s more, the entire journey, after leaving humanity’s Last Redoubt—a mind-bogglingly gigantic fortified pyramid—happens in an eternal night, long after the sun has faded and died. The only light, and not everywhere is any, is provided by restless fires from gas flares or fluxes from distant volcanoes. And, as a concluding thought, the novel’s awkward language might even intensify this reading experience, as it forces the reader to focus and keeps them from flying through the pages.

Finally, the full quote from Lovecraft’s essay:

Of rather uneven stylistic quality, but vast occasional power in its suggestion of lurking worlds and beings behind the ordinary surface of life, is the work of William Hope Hodgson, known today far less than it deserves to be. Despite a tendency toward conventionally sentimental conceptions of the universe, and of man’s relation to it and to his fellows, Mr. Hodgson is perhaps second only to Algernon Blackwood in his serious treatment of unreality. Few can equal him in adumbrating the nearness of nameless forces and monstrous besieging entities through casual hints and insignificant details, or in conveying feelings of the spectral and the abnormal in connexion with regions or buildings.

Hodgson’s The Night Land was one of the most vivid and memorable reading experiences in years.

Special thanks to Doug, who pointed me to it!
Header image public domain, courtesy of James Lee (Pexels).

Addendum
Just found out that Lin Carter, for whom I have a special fondness for enshittifying the Lancer edition of Howard’s Conan stories (“Now if you asked me about my favorite antagonists across all of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, I’d say it’s L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter”), also enshittified Hodgson’s The Night Land as an editor for Ballantine two-volume edition in 1972. This fucking guy.