Book Review: ‘The Night Land’

Featured artwork: “Attack of the Abhumans” by Jeremiah Humphries.

The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson. . Published by various, but available through Project Gutenberg.

Around the turn of the century, the Englishman William Hope Hodgson spent several years as a seaman before he attempted to make a living as a personal trainer, during which time he led a colorful life and even had a controversial run-in with Houdini. When making money from exercise didn’t pan out, he in 1904 turned to writing fiction in the vein of Edgar Allan Poe and ultimately produced a large body of work.

Recently, I read my way through the most famous of his writings, including The House on the Borderland, the stories of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, and The Ghost Pirates. Then, with much trepidation yet determination, I turned to the most gargantuan and formidable of his works, his novel The Night Land.

Twice before, I have tried to get through The Night Land. Twice before, I failed. But this time, I grit my teeth and slogged my way through, though I believe the effort took me almost a year (I read a lot of other things in the meantime, of course). Hodgson was never a great writer by any standard, but he could spin a good yarn from time to time; some of his stories set at sea show both a genuine knowledge of seamanship and skill at adventure-writing, and certain scenes in The House on the Borderland show him to be a competent action writer as well. But The Night Land is simultaneously a breathtaking work of imagination and a nigh unreadable act of self-indulgence and pretentiousness. It is Hodgson’s magnum opus—but the problem is that he knew it was his magnum opus, so he wrote like a middle-schooler picking up a pen for the first time, convinced that he was crafting a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.

I likely would not have read this book if it did not come highly recommended by John C. Wright, the husband of my editor, who has produced a series of frightening and beautiful novelettes based on it (collected in Awake in the Night Land) and who insists that its fantastic elements are so important that its glaring flaws deserve to be overlooked.

Having read the novel, I haven’t decided whether to agree with him or not. On the one hand, yes, Hodgson forged a new path in the world of fantasy and deserves credit for such bold inventions, but on the other hand … the book is just awful. I mean it’s really, really bad.

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Working Away

I’m over here working on the third volume of Jake and the Dynamo, which is going all right, though I’m a tad frustrated that I still haven’t heard anything from potential publishers. Anyway, while I’m writing a rough draft, I often listen to music, and I have recently found some dude on YouTube who does “ambient metal,” which is kind of nice because it’s a style I like and doesn’t have any words to distract me.

‘Alien’ vs. ‘Bloodchild,’ Part 3: The Director’s Cut

Before we get into a further discussion of the themes of Alien, I want to spend a little time on the director’s cut, which released in 2003. Ridley Scott went back over the film, tightening up parts and adding in a few deleted scenes. Unusually, the end result was a minute shorter than the original theatrical release.

My personal opinion about “director’s cuts” in general is that I don’t like them. In my experience, more often than not, a director’s cut is analogous to a novelist who goes over the head of his editor and includes a bunch of material he was advised to take out. More often than not, it’s material the final product was better off not having.

The biggest change in Alien is a scene near the end in which Ripley finds two of her crewmates cocooned into a wall by the alien’s secretions, a scene that anticipates the alien hive full of ill-fated colonists in the sequel—a concept James Cameron apparently came up with independently. Although kind of a welcome detail in hindsight, it disrupts the tension of movie’s climax, and for that reason the film is better off without it.

Also, I have twice now seen fans interpreting this as depicting human victims transforming into alien eggs, something that would contradict the alien life cycle that the franchise ultimately developed, though I admit this interpretation does not appear to me to be warranted by anything in the scene.

The only included scene that I thought made an improvement is after the first crewman, Brett, gets killed: Two others rush in to see the alien dragging him away, which makes for a better transition to the next scene.

Aside from that, most of the changes are almost impossible to notice except to someone who’s memorized the film.

I thought something similar when I watched the theatrical and director’s cut versions of the sequel Aliens side-by-side. Aliens is an action movie, and the theatrical version is faster-paced and more intense. The added scenes—a monologue by a marine, a pointless subplot featuring automatic gun turrets, a lengthy scene featuring the doomed colonists—accomplish nothing except slowing down the action. Again, there’s one exception, the detail that Ripley had a daughter who died while Ripley was in suspended animation, which anticipates her relationship with the orphan girl Newt.

Also, I have to add one additional curiosity: I have never thought Alien, with its deliberately slow pacing, was very scary. I recently showed it to the magical girl for the first time, and she made the same comment, that it was an impressive film but not particularly frightening. She was clearly much more moved by Aliens, which made her jump or squeal several times and during which she showed a lot more emotional engagement.

Working Away

I’ve been out of communication partly because our internet has been wonky, but everything seems to be working again, at least for the time being.

I am admittedly having trouble with Son of Hel, my novel about Krampus and Santa Claus, so for the time being I’m working on the third volume of Jake and the Dynamo, which is under the working title of The Shadow of His Shadow.

I still have manuscripts out but haven’t heard back from publishers. I’m also working on an essay I’m going to submit to an upcoming collection; I’ll tell you more about that when the time comes.

Memes!

Tattoo Assassins

James Rolfe’s “Angry Video Game Nerd” is considerably more vulgar than the usual here, so I have to give a language warning. Nonetheless, I am reposting this video for the sole reason that, upon watching it, I suddenly want to see a bad-good comedy-action movie based on the never-released Mortal Kombat ripoff game Tattoo Assassins. That thing looks hilarious.

Anime Review: ‘Darling in the FRANXX’

Where “riding a giant robot” takes on a new meaning.

Darling in the FRANXX, written by Naotaki Hayashi, et al. Directed by Atsushi Nishigori. Starring Yûto Uemura, Kana Ichinose, and Nanami Yamashita. A-1 Pictures / Trigger, . 24 episodes of 24 minutes (approx. ). Not rated.

Available on Crunchyroll.

Darling in the FRANXX made a stir when it appeared in , though most of the buzz that reached my ears had little to do with the quality of the show itself. On the one hand, I saw people praising it because they regarded its heroine, a girl called Zero Two, as good waifu material—humorous, of course, but not serious criticism. On the other hand, and much more bizarre, I saw people attacking it because the show’s ultimate message is (gasp) that marrying and having children might be worthwhile things to do.

It is a strange world where such a message is controversial, yet here we are.
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Negative

The magical girl got the results of her test for the Chinese coronavirus back. The results were negative. So there is one case in our town, but so far zero confirmed cases in our house.

Currently working on Son of Hel, and I want to keep plugging away, so I’m not sure I’ll get a post up today. At the moment, I’m working on a sequence in which St. Nicholas entertains Queen Titania of Fairyland, so I’m researching full-course meals to make sure everything is proper and dignified. It’s making me hungry.

Updates in the Time of Quarantine

I’m a few days late on the next in my series of essays partly because I was watching both the theatrical and directors’-cut versions of both Alien and Aliens to refresh my memory. I am of the heretical opinion that the theatrical version of both movies is the superior one, an opinion I may discuss at greater length later.

For now, I wish to give a more personal update. The magical girl and I got married three weeks ahead of our original schedule because she’s a nurse, and I wanted to limit her contact with her elderly parents, with whom she was living. That’s why we got married in a private ceremony with the permission of our bishop, and we were just in time, as all public ceremonies of any sort were suspended just a week later.

Anyway, as I assumed would eventually happen, she’s now definitely been exposed to the virus at the hospital where she works, though her own test results aren’t back yet. In any case, if she has it, I definitely have it. We’re quarantining ourselves in our apartment right now while we wait. Nobody in our immediate vicinity, including the patient who tested positive at the hospital, is exhibiting symptoms.

It just so happens that we got this news right as we were beginning our break from work that was originally supposed to be the start of our marriage and honeymoon. That works out well for us: I’m off work anyway, but I’ll be put on administrative leave later if it looks like I need to stay away from my job for longer than our planned vacation.

Admittedly, the two of us are having a much better time than a great many people. While others are getting seriously ill or going stir-crazy, we’re on a little newlywed honeymoon staycation, which both of us are mostly enjoying, even without the slightly larger wedding and honeymoon we originally planned. In any case, the way events have played out have convinced me that I did the right thing to ask the bishop to let us marry early, a request he graciously granted even though it was Lent. I had some doubts at the time, naturally, but now I’m further convinced that was the right move.

‘Alien’ vs. ‘Bloodchild,’ Part 2

Today, as promised, we continue to compare and contrast the famous and influential film Alien with the less well-known but nonetheless celebrated short story “Bloodchild” by Octavia Butler. In this essay, I will tease out some of the themes and concepts behind Alien.

For much of the content in today’s post and in subsequent posts, I am indebted to Xenopedia, the Alien vs. Predator wiki, where hardworking fans have compiled a lot of history and trivia, as well as an essay I read many years ago and have not (alas) been able to relocate.

It was this essay, of unknown title and authorship, that first made me aware of the sexual symbolism behind the creature designs and situations in the Alien movie. The premise of the essay was that Alien is ultimately about “fear of female sexuality” (that men are terrified of horny women is one of feminism’s most popular canards). Although exhaustively explaining the film’s imagery, the essay failed to make its case, and I came away from it with the opinion that Alien is a mishmash of sexual menace with no real point behind it—an opinion I still hold, and which I will ultimately defend.

Continue reading “‘Alien’ vs. ‘Bloodchild,’ Part 2”