Huge let-down

William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land sounded very promising, especially when the wiki page stated it had received praise from Lovecraft. I expected cosmic horror on a level close to the Cthulu mythos. Now I wonder if the book itself was some sort of joke or satire that Lovecraft was in on, maybe some sort of long-winded humor that I didn't catch as a modern reader, like the way Gulliver's Travels was a satire of adventure novels.

The supernatural

The supernatural elements of horror in the novel seem to be begging to be better fleshed out. The Night Land is filled with interesting sketches, from the presumably once-human beasts and giants that roam around its lava pits, to the extra-dimensional, Lovecraftian horrors that come through “windows” in the sky.

A sound of laughter can be heard from the mysterious Northeast; a demonic, huddled giant creeps closer to the last habitation of mankind at an imperceptibly slow rate; on a hill to the North is the House of Silence, whence no one has ever returned; a single road crosses the land, on which “The Silent Ones” walk, like lethal pilgrims on one final crossing.

Each of these concepts, and others I haven't mentioned, feels like it's calling out to be investigated. Yet they are overshadowed and passed over in favor of a love quest that quickly becomes a great bore.

The love story

The love story element seems overly simplistic, a plot device to drive the protagonist onward in his quest. The protagonist's relationship to Lady Mirdath, and later on with her post-cataclysmic incarnation, Naani, is completely one-dimensional and can be summed up as “You know, I loved her. You'll understand if you've ever loved!”

This in itself is not the problem, however. The problem is that for something so superficial and underdeveloped, it occupies a preposterous amount of the book. The reader is presented ad nauseam with nearly identical scenes of affection, where no real depth of emotion is ever probed. The number of paragraphs that I would have snipped simply because they included the phrase: “…for I loved her so utter.” is ridiculous.

There's also the weirdness of his relationship to this young woman, which I think dips a toe in Buffalo Bill territory, even by early 20th centry standards. The narrator never misses the opportunity, after gracing us with the hundredth description of how they slept together (WITHOUT SEX!!!! Let that be clear!!!), to tell us how he is both lover and father figure to this girl, and how she is likewise lover and mother to him. I generally try to keep an open mind when reading stories from relatively long ago. You know, I try to think that some expressions may not have carried the weight or meaning they do now, and how the author can't help but be a product of his times, etc. But I've read my share of old-timey fiction and I don't remember coming across a dynamic quite like this one. I mean, the narrator physically disciplines this girl with a tree branch at one point. It's just weird.

The repetition

The final nail in this novel's coffin is the way it begs for an editor. I think this book today would sensibly be reduced at least in half by any half-competent editor who's earnest about selling it at all. As mentioned above, the author has no qualms about telling you for the seventeenth time in the same chapter how much he loved his reincarnated lover, or how he strove not to hurt her with his armour when hugging her, and a hundred other little situations that honestly make the entire book sound like a dorky teenager jerking off to a self-insertion fanfic in his man-cave.

What bothered me the most while reading this novel, though, wasn't the infantile conception of love depicted by Hodgson, but what its constant presence implied: pages taken away from the more interesting elements of the story. It's fine if the author likes to mention things and then leave them completely to the reader's imagination; tell me there are rifts in the sky that untold horrors come through, then move on and leave me to wonder whether they have tentacles. That's charming, in its own way. What I don't like is that instead of delving into the horrors that inhabit the Night Land, we get to sit and fester with this insipid, discount love story for the whole ride. I'm okay with not getting more than a sip of wine, but did you really have to give me a gallon of piss instead?

Save yourself the displeasure.

All in all, even though the landscape of the Night Land is rife with juicy terrors that really caught my interest, I couldn't in good faith reccommend it. The only way I would give it another read is if someone went in there and hacked off all the stale love story elements and all its tiresome repetition, pretty much cutting the whole thing in half, but at that point you might as well not bother with it. It's sad, I really think it had some potential.