This is another book I listened to via LibriVox rather than actually reading, and the reader's monotone delivery probably made this seem slower than iThis is another book I listened to via LibriVox rather than actually reading, and the reader's monotone delivery probably made this seem slower than it is.
The story centers on a weird house near an isolated Irish village. The owner keeps a journal, describing strange events and experiences he has there.
In the first half of the book, he has a sort of out-of-body experience, and then over the course of a week is besieged by "swine-creatures" -- humanoid, pig-faced beings that seem to be coming from a pit near his house. His defense of the house against the brutish, semi-intelligent things (all the while trying to conceal the horror of it from his fragile, elderly sister) clearly inspired a lot of similar scenarios in later horror and suspense fiction, and deftly mixes action with a slowly-building sense of doom and dread. When the narrator sets out to investigate the pit itself, again we get some good action/horror. Then Hodgson slams on the brakes for the second half of the book.
In the second half, we are treated to chapter after chapter of visions while the narrator apparently travels through space and time, watching the world's end. (I'm sure that the reader of the LibriVox recording I listened to made this a lot worse than it would be to read.) It becomes very clear in this part why HP Lovecraft held Hodgson is such high esteem, for we are treated to long, ponderous passages describing strange vistas, unfocused dread, and horror at the vastness of the universe. Hodgson may have intended to one-up H.G. Wells' The Time Machine here. The cosmic horror of the story may actually avoid being dated in the way the HP Lovecraft's horror is, but to say why would possibly be a spoiler, so I'll leave a few blank lines before saying. . . . . . . . . . . The narrator apparently lives in a house "on the borderland" not just of the wilderness and civilization, but on the borders of earth, heaven, and hell. The "heaven" he finds is, however, merely a place of oblivion, and the "hell" has much more sway over the earth than anyone realizes, and could burst through to the surface at any moment. So, because Hodgson's narrator clings to his utterly impotent faith, the horror is revealed to be a bit deeper than the simple existential despair of Lovecraft's stories....more
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