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.
Lovecraft’s Take
In 1927, H. P. Lovecraft produced an authoritative survey of horror fiction, entitled “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” and he briefly discussed the corpus of Hodgson, which Lovecraft rightly described as “of rather uneven stylistic quality.” He gives perhaps the best one-paragraph summary of The Night Land imaginable:
The Night Land is a long-extended (583 pp.) tale of the earth’s infinitely remote future—billions of billions of years ahead, after the death of the sun. It is told in a rather clumsy fashion, as the dreams of a man in the seventeenth century, whose mind merges with its own future incarnation; and is seriously marred by painful verboseness, repetitiousness, artificial and nauseously sticky romantic sentimentality, and an attempt at archaic language even more grotesque and absurd than that in ‘Glen Carrig’.
This is a fair description, and though it focuses on the negative, it also partly captures the imaginativeness of the story.
Summary
Let us flesh this description out. The novel is narrated in first-person by a man who never gives his name, and Lovecraft is probably correct that he lives in the seventeenth century, though I don’t think even this is made clear. What is clear is that he is a muscular, athletic, and well-to-do English country gentleman who falls madly in love with a woman with the odd name of Mirdath the Beautiful. The story of their courtship stretches out for several pages but forms only the novel’s foreword.
After Mirdath sickens and dies, the narrator has a vision of the far future so complete in detail that he is certain it is true: He will be reincarnated long after the sun is dead, when the remnants of humanity live in a seven-mile-high pyramid, the Last Redoubt, a fortress against the monstrosities haunting the cold and dark world outside. These monstrosities come in several varieties—primordial monsters arisen out of the Earth, products of twisted science, degenerate forms of humanity, and worst of all, unnameable creatures from outer space or higher dimensions that can devour men’s souls. These monsters of every variety encircle the Last Redoubt like sharks about a ship, awaiting the day when its defenses fall.
Although the Last Redoubt is a fortress, its true protection is in the form of the “Circle,” a glowing tube around the pyramid, which is powered by the “Earth Current,” a mysterious force that is beneficial to humans but harmful to monsters. Hodgson doesn’t give much detail about the Earth Current or the Circle, though to get an idea of what he has in mind, we can turn to the Carnacki the Ghost-Finder stories; the character of Carnacki is armed with an “electric pentagram,” a complex of vacuum tubes through which he runs current, and which is capable of keeping back dangerous spirits.
Hodgson apparently envisions the Circle as a similar device, and this is representative of Hodgson’s work as a whole: Although he wrote stories of ghosts and monsters, following certain trends of the day, and anticipating H. P. Lovecraft’s own work, he attempts to couch his descriptions of the supernatural in scientific terms. His “ghosts,” such as in The Ghost Pirates, are actually creatures from a higher dimension or region of the physical universe. Similarly, although The Night Land deals with souls and reincarnation, it envisions these as the subject of some as-yet undiscovered branch of science.
The people of the Last Redoubt apparently have some limited psychic powers, being able to project messages with their “brain-elements.” The narrator has an even greater power, called “Night Hearing,” which attunes him to the monsters of the Night Land. Thanks to this ability, he joins the Monstruwacans (monster-watchers) who observe the Night Land through their massive telescope at the pyramid’s pinnacle. While watching with the Monstruwacans, the narrator receives messages that prove to be from fellow humans: In the distant past, a second redoubt was constructed, and its inhabitants have now managed to send a message, but their supply of Earth Current is failing and they will soon fall prey to the higher powers that hunger for their souls. Not only that, but the woman who has sent the message from the Lesser Redoubt, our narrator discovers, is none other than the reincarnation of his long-lost love, Mirdath the Beautiful.
After an ill-fated rescue mission ends with several young men having lost their souls to the most formidable of man’s enemies, the mysterious House of Silence, the narrator decides to venture alone into the Night Land to find the reincarnated Mirdath and bring her back. The journey requires intense preparations, both physical and spiritual, and he wears a suit of finely crafted armor to deflect the monsters and a cloak to ward off the biting cold. His weapon is the Diskos, a combination battle-ax and buzz saw: It is a pole topped with a spinning, razor-sharp disc charged with Earth Current. He can eat nothing that grows in the Night Land, so his only food and drink are nutrient tablets and a powder that turns to water when exposed to air. The authorities of the Last Redoubt sternly warn him of the likelihood of torture, mutilation, death, or damnation that awaits him, and under one forearm, he has surgically implanted a poisoned capsule that he must bite if any of the higher powers come upon him, for to die by his own hand is better than to have his soul devoured (a similar concept, again, appears in the Carnacki stories).
Once he has gone through the preparation, the lights of the Redoubt’s first floor are extinguished and the great, armored door opened. He steps out, unlikely to return.
What follows after that should be a nail-biting story of horror, adventure, and action. Unfortunately, it is hundreds of pages just to get to that point, and everything that comes before and after is a morass of bad writing. There is some high adventure, and there is some good hand-to-hand combat with the terrors of the Night Land, and there are close shaves with the soul-devouring higher powers, which are as weird and wonderful as they should be.
But the novel is inhibited by three things, on which I will elaborate below.
Criticism
Repetition
First, Hodgson has an obsessive-compulsive need to narrate trivial details to the point of monotony. Outside of the present work, this bad habit is most evident in The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig,’ a story of shipwreck and high-seas adventure. Near the book’s climax, the sailors, attempting to escape an island, spend several days braiding rope. Hodgson cannot bring himself to simply write, “We spent seven days braiding rope,” but instead describes each day, individually, using the same words. It is as if he heard the classic advice for beginning writers, “Show don’t tell,” and took them too much to heart.
Although that advice is a good rule of thumb for beginners, who usually suffer from a lack of detail rather than an excess, a well-crafted story actually needs both showing and telling; the trick is to figure out when each method of narration is appropriate. Hodgson does not have a good grasp of this, and it is most evident in his longer works. The Night Land, being his longest, is also his most repetitive: His narrator obsessively dictates exactly when he eats and sleeps, and how many tablets he consumes. Although such details would indeed be extremely important to a man in his situation, who needs to think carefully about exactly when he can rest and how much he can afford to eat, they are brain-numbing to the reader. Just as in the rope-braiding sequence in Glen Carrig, Hodgson cannot bring himself to pass over days in which nothing happens, so we get chapter after chapter and page after page of walking, crawling, sleeping, and eating.
Note above that Lovecraft indicates that the copy of this book he read was 583 pages, long enough to be what is now sometimes called a “mega-novel.” There happens to be a rewritten version of The Night Land, a reimagining by James Stoddard, which attempts to make up for the original’s narrative deficits. It runs to a mere 284 pages. Before looking up the page count on Stoddard’s book, I almost wrote that half of Hodgson’s novel could be cut, easily, and it turns out I was approximately correct: Stoddard’s version is a little under half the length of the original.
Bad Writing
Second, Hodgson attempted to write the novel in what he apparently thought was a majestic style, but he was terribly, terribly wrong. Lovecraft touches on this, describing the prose as “grotesque and absurd.” The effect is somewhat like a well-meaning Christian trying to pray in the language of the King James Bible, or an English major attempting to imitate Shakespeare, but without understanding how Elizabethan English actually works.
To get across what The Night Land is like, the best I can do is quote it. Steel yourselves:
And surely, when I was come again to where the trees did be more spare, I saw that I was come nigh to that river which I crost on the raft, as you shall mind; and truly I did be glad, and to feel safe in a moment. Yet I was firm now to my purpose; for I set the Maid to the earth upon her feet, and kept my hold very sure upon her; for I did mean that I whip her, before that her love-foolishness bring her needless unto death.
And I took the belt from her pretty waist, for it did be but a light strap, and I whipt her very sharp over her shoulders with the belt. And, truly, she did make to nestle unto me in a moment, as that other time when that I whipt her; but I stayed her from this, and I set the belt thrice more across her shoulders, very sharp, so that she to learn wisdom at once, and I to be free for ever of this need to pain her, which did hurt me very strange.
And the Maid to stand very quiet, now that I did keep her from coming unto me; and her head did be something bent, so that I knew not whether I did mayhap have flogged her over-hard; for I did be something lacking in knowledge whether that a maid be very easy hurt.
And I stooped and lookt into her face; and lo! she did be smiling naughtily, and kist me in a moment very saucy upon the mouth, ere I did be aware; and afterward, she laughed and made try to make a bitter mock upon me, and askt when that I should be pleased to cease from whipping my chattel; for that then she should run away immediately into the wood, and to trust the Humpt Men that they protect her from me.
I apologize for the length, but it is necessary to convey the monotony of the style. You can see, first, that there is no dialogue, and the entire novel is written this way: There is not one line of dialogue in the entire book even though much of it involves people interacting with one another.
Sentimentality
The scene quoted comes from the novel’s second half, which is easily the dullest and most difficult to read for the very reason Lovecraft articulates—“artificial and nauseously sticky romantic sentimentality.”
Now, to be fair, we know from Lovecraft’s work as well as his life that he was no friend of romantic sentimentality, so for the opposite view, I must point to John C. Wright’s foreword to Awake in the Night Land, in which he vigorously defends the romance of this novel. Speaking for myself, however, although I side with Wright on the subject of love and courtship per se, I side with Lovecraft on this particular book: Near the novel’s middle, the unnamed narrator finds Nani, the reincarnated Mirdath, and begins guiding her back toward the Last Redoubt, but even though they are in bad straits, surrounded by danger, and constantly facing exhaustion as well and the threat of death, and even though Nani lost her entire family and all her people to the ravenous monsters of the wastes, these two spend their entire trip flirting and teasing like a couple of grade-schoolers playing doctor behind the garage.
Their love-play is vicariously embarrassing, like accidentally walking through the unlocked door of a honeymoon suite, and it’s made worse by its inappropriateness—and by inappropriate, I don’t mean lewd. I mean that, throughout the second half of this book, I was yelling at the characters, “Can’t you save this until you get home? You’re surrounded by effing monsters!” It got to point that I wanted to see them get eaten on account of their idiocy. Nani, especially, pissed me off: At one point, just to tease the protagonist, she deliberately leaves her shoes next to a hot spring and makes the narrator retrace his steps for an entire mile to retrieve them, even though they’re exhausted, their food is running low, and backtracking means a real possibility of death or worse. Shortly after that, he nearly ends up dead because she petulantly refuses to stick close to him.
She’s supposedly an almost perfect woman, the love of his life worth waiting billions of years for, but I wanted to beat the living hell out of this stupid bint.
Hodgson on Love
It appears to me here that Hodgson’s personal philosophy is intruding on his writing. The situation of the book demands much more tension, with romantic interest pushed to the background until it can reasonably be indulged, but Hodgson has strong opinions about amore, and he lets them come to fore even though they’re grossly inappropriate considering the situation.
We can get an idea of Hodgson’s ideas about love and romance from his short story “The Captain of the Onion Boat,” which appears in Men of the Deep Waters, a short-story collection tied together by the theme of seamanship. Easily one of Hogdson’s worst shorts, “Onion Boat” describes a fisherman who had been lost at sea and given up for dead many years before. When he was thought dead, his betrothed, a wealthy heiress, became a nun. Now, many years later, he stares longingly at the convent where she is enclosed and ultimately hatches a plan to elope with her.
Narratively, “Onion Boat” is simple and might have been entertaining, except Hodgson gives in to the same temptation he gives into in The Night Land—the need to preach about love. His opinions on that particular subject are what we might call Puritanical, and by that, I do not mean prudish; rather, I mean the word in its literal sense, as being that of the Puritans. In particular, his views on love and marriage resemble that greatest work of Puritanism, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, except conveyed much less artfully: Erotic love is the highest earthly experience of human beings, every individual has a soul mate, and finding that soul mate is of such importance that it outweighs vows, social obligations, and moral duties. For this reason, Milton was in his time known as “the Divorcer,” though he himself never had a divorce, because he advocated for divorce: After all, if finding a soul mate is of such grave importance, then anyone who finds himself married to someone who is not his soul mate ought to be free to dissolve that marriage and start another.
It may sound bizarre to modern ears to hear that our divorce culture descends from Puritanism, but so it is.
Hodgson has similar ideas about soul mates, as suggested by the fantastic but compelling idea that Mirdath and the narrator of Night Land have reincarnated repeatedly throughout human history, seeking and finding each other time after time. He makes the idea less fantastic but more explicit in “Onion Boat,” in which the captain decides to retrieve his lady love from the convent, sacred vows be damned.
“Onion Boat” displays a lot of contempt for celibacy in particular and for Catholicism in general, though I’m not convinced it was very knowledgeable about either: Although Hodgson’s protagonist dramatically abducts his beloved by stealing her through a window, she probably could have left by the front door had she wanted; after all, convents are not prisons. Given the circumstances of the story (a fiancé is thought dead but makes a return), any scandal from the lady giving up her habit would probably have been minor.
And if we want to dive a bit deeper, given that the lady was undoubtedly distraught after her beloved’s apparent death, a case could be made from canon law that her vows were invalid since the Church does not recognize vows made under duress or extreme stress—and for a historical case, we have Heloise, of Abelard-and-Heloise fame; some of those present at her vow to take the veil argued that it was invalid because she was obviously distressed. Besides that, Catholicism does have methods in place for laicizing priests or defrocking (de-habiting?) religious; it may be frowned upon, but quitting one’s religious vows is not an impossibility.
As Hodgson tells it, however, both the captain and the nun, being devout, believe their acts are leading them to inevitable damnation—but they do it anyway because, in Hodgson’s view, romantic love is more important than damnation. This would have been tolerable except Hodgson falls into his bad habit of repetition: He makes clear that he dislikes the Catholic religion and vows of celibacy—and then he tells you about it again. And again. And again.
Although decidedly less preachy, The Night Land has the same problem of preachiness compounded by an overwrought style and a decidedly childish manner of courtship: The characters flirt and giggle, and then they do it again. And again. And the embarrassment their behavior induces is made worse by the dangerous setting.
Conclusion
I have harped more on the negatives than on the positives because this is such a difficult book to read. It really does have some amazing concepts, however, which I’ve barely touched on: The Doorways in the Night, entries into higher dimensions through which malevolent powers peer; the Watchers, mountain-sized beings that move at a glacial pace; the Night Hounds, horse-sized wolves with sharks’ teeth; or the House of Silence, a brightly lit mansion that lures men in with hypnotic snares, are all such brilliant ideas. The Redoubt itself, an enormous pyramid full of cities, or the Diskos, a spinning weapon of living metal with a psychic connection to its wielder, are stunning concepts, years ahead of their time. The backstory of this dying world—the upheavals that opened an enormous rift in the Earth, the fading of the sun, the past ages of this apocalyptic future in which cities travel forever toward the east on a moving road to escape the cold or in which men spend eons building a highway into a molten and monster-haunted inner Earth—these are astounding and could fill whole books on their own.
Even the theme of eternal love would be great if only the delivery weren’t so gag-inducing. It is unfortunate that this novel is so bad because it is so full of good things. We have here before us one of the best and one of the worst fantasy novels of all time, so I recommend it as in important artifact, but I cannot say I enjoyed reading it. It is astonishing—and it is utterly awful.
