Pre-Lovecraft Weird - a Goodreads Review of The House on the Borderland

Click to set custom HTML

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I rarely review books I consider less than 4 or 5 star reads (though some of my unrated ones may just be books I didn't have time to review when I finished them), but will give this a shot as it's considered foundation work for weird fiction. **Some spoilers ahead**

I can easily see why Lovecraft was taken with this, and certainly some of the things I see as flaws may be a product of the time period (a liberal use of adverbs would be an understatement). I'll try not to reveal too much, but a fair chunk of the book is given over to a multi-chapter description of eons passing. Granted, it includes some interesting images and concepts - whether purely imaginary or ahead of their time scientifically (the sun dying, a new ice age, etc) - that must have been pretty mind-blowing to people when the book came out. Unfortunately, the description of eons passing reads nearly in real-time, or at least, felt like it to me. The pacing in much of the book is like watching an Orson Wells movie in super slow-motion. Add to that the lack of character building - the main character is little more than a sketch, and WHY is the sister included in the book? She lives in the house, but the poor thing doesn't get a single line of dialogue and spends most of her brief on-stage time fainting, swooning, trembling, running away, or locking herself in her room.

Though completely different sorts of books, older novels like Lud-in-the-Mist, written in 1926 by Hope Mirrlees, or Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis (written later still, in the 1950s, which maybe makes the comparison too unfair) have pacing, characterization, and story that Hodgson's book can't begin to compare to for me. The House on the Borderland was an interesting read for reasons of looking at an early rendition of weird, but didn't do a lot for me otherwise. 3 stars - innovation and originality in the fiction elements, atmosphere, and what it tried to accomplish, but a tedious read for me in places.

View all my reviews