The House On the Borderland
Posted in DC Comics on 16. Mar, 2010
$49.93
Product Description
The story of an adventure in time and space that spans all of creation. A building, constructed across an invisible chasm of space-time, fated to witness the very end of the world, is waiting with open doors for anyone who dares to enter it.Amazon.com Review
This classic novel of the weird supernatural, first published in 1908, was an important influence on H. P. Lovecraft. In the ruins of an ancient stone house in Ireland is found the diary of an elderly man who lived alone with his sister and their pets, and who longed for his lost love. The diary tells of how the man explores a cyclopean cavern beneath the house and fights off swarms of white pig-like monsters pouring up from below. Then, in a visionary sequence, he breaks through to an alternate space-time dimension and sees a doppelganger of his house on a vast desolate plain. The prose is hokey at times, but the strange mood evoked by the other-dimensional setting is powerful indeed. As acclaimed horror writer T. E. D. Klein says, "Never has a book so hauntingly conveyed a sense of terrible loneliness and isolation."
The House On the Borderland
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(…) This book is an adventure story about a guy who has a gun and a whole buttload of pigpeople to kill. Zoom! Boom! Bazoom! That’s what I think his shotgun sounded like as he unloaded it into those foul creatures! It’s crazy, I tell you!
Then he goes into space right? To the GREEN SUN. Obviously a play on the Loc-Nar from the movie Heavy Metal. What a load. William H. Hodgeson obviously travelled into the future to copy it. Or maybe the Grimaldi guy went back in time and showed him the story boards. I don’t know. But it’s crazy, I tell you! (…)
Rating: 2 / 5
it’s alright, but a little hokey and dated, and i don’t know what book most of the other reviewers on this page read. two young men find a manuscript in the ruins of a castle about a guy shooting white pigs out his window. wow. talk about “cosmic dread” and “icy terror”. there was nothing spectacular or even slightly memorable about this book, except the beginning. the reason everyone gives such verbose praise to this thoroughly forgettable, antiquated novel is that lovecraft said a few good words about it. but let’s remember our friendly neighborhood sheep, he was a man of his times, and i seriously doubt that if he was alive he would have such lavish praise for this novel now. lovecraft’s material dated well (except for the racism), so did blackwood’s (aside from the pantheism), so did lefanu and bierce’s:hodgson’s most certainly did not. skip it and read something by arthur machen or thomas ligotti.
Rating: 2 / 5
I’m a big fan of HP Lovecraft’s. Encouraged by his high opinion of this book and a couple of favorable reviews here, I decided to purchase it. The first couple of chapters are quite promising, and one certain sees the germs of several ideas that are later developed to much better effect by Lovecraft in his stories, particularly evidently in The Lurking Fear and The Rats In The Walls. Unfortunately, the book begins to ramble very early. Several disparate–and, it has to be said, not very interesting–themes are introduced and then just dropped, resulting in the kind of story the guy in the movie Memento might have written if he had been a hack writer trying to support his opium habit, paid by the word by some third rate 30′s pulp magazine. As is common in this genre, character development is minimal and the prose style is no better than serviceable with a few interesting archaisms.
It is very rare that I do not finish a book once got past the first couple of chapters, especially one as short as this. However, I found nothing here to hold my interest through to the end. This book is of historical interest only. Fans of Lovecraft with other than a purely academic interest in the writers who influenced him should turn instead to the superb ghost stories in MR James’ “Ghost Stories of an Antiquary”.
Rating: 1 / 5
I have to agree with the reviewers from Illinois and Ohio. There are about 30 really good pages of horror which were very scary however after that the plot totally changes and it just lost me in all this end-of-the-world/space-time imagery that it was impossible to follow…not that I even really cared to follow because it wasn’t scary at all. As a science-fiction book it was o.k. but as a horror book it was really lame.
Rating: 2 / 5
Lovecraft spoke highly of Hodgeson, as did Smith. This particular book definitely fits into the genre of weird. The reason that I gave it only three stars is that I have read or seen these ideas before. However, the reason it gets as many stars as it does is that this is most likely the source of all those other texts and films. Many of the concepts that horror writers and film makers use seem to appear in this book, though long before they became so easily recognizable. I imagine someone reading this volume without having had the benefit of years of horror films and books to desensitize one to the concepts introduced, and I imagine that this book freaked the holy bejeezus out of him. Don’t break the bank to get it, but if you’re interested in turn of the century horror this will be one you won’t want to miss.
Rating: 3 / 5