The House on the Borderland

This was my second book of the month of Octoer (even if I actually started it earlier than Left Hand of Darkness) and the spookiest of the three. It’s all about cosmic horror, existential dread, fear of the unknown and all of that mumbo jumbo that is often attributed to H.P. Lovecraft but well, it actually comes from here!

This is an earlier work by William Hope Hodgson, published in 1908 and doing a lot of heavy-lifting for the genre already! A novel that starts out with two rather unimportant characters who end up lost and find an old notebook after exploring the remains of some old building.

The ancient manuscript details the experiences of an old man—our protagonist and unreliable narrator—who lives in a house… on the borderland. The rest of the book is pretty much just the found text, with a couple of footnotes here and there from the characters reacting to it.

All we get is the perspective of this old man as he goes through plenty of supernatural experiences, involving impossible journeys across time and space, abnormal creatures that seek to surround and invade his home, physical phenomena altering the environment around him, encounters with dark and demonic beings in alternate dimensions, and bearing witness to cosmic events beyond comprehension, and quite a lot more.

The narrator is pretty much going insane as the story goes on, more unreliable and difficult to understand. The writing also decays over time, we start to get only fragments and glimpses at whatever may be going on, and all we can do is read what is there and imply the worst.

There are multiple events described here. I don’t think there’s anything truly terrifying about any of them, but the phsycological dread is present, the fear of the unknown is there. The descriptions of the events are rather well done, and those where survival is involved do have quite a bit of tension that builds up quite well.

I have to say that a lot of the events that are more like “visions”, while extremely interesting—and maybe even educational for the 1900s—can drag on for quite a while. Descriptions of planets and stars and cosmic events across incomprehensible amounts of time take a lot of… time, to be fleshed out in the writing. I guess that is kind of the point, and nothing compared to what the character goes through, at least.

One factor to consider is that I had to read most of this book in both English and Spanish. There were a lot of words I didn’t understand in English (mostly related to environment descriptions, and old English expressions) and some words I also didn’t get in my own language (mostly those about parts of old houses or furniture, or words not common in Mexico, since the translation is from Spain). I wish I had kept track of the words just to share examples, but I don’t have any at the moment.

This is another of those books that I can’t really say I enjoyed fully, but that have nonetheless expanded my horizons and brought something new to the table for my experience. I don’t know if I can go through more purely cosmic horror novels, but I have enjoyed it in smaller doses when it is present in other more general works of fiction (like The Expanse, Hothouse, Roadside Picnic and the like), and it’s neat to have see an early version of that. I should probably check some modern works in the genre though, we’ll see!

This is day 64 of #100DaysToOffload