The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson [PDF]
by InfoBooks
The House on the Borderland starts with two friends on a fishing holiday in the west of Ireland. Then one night, in the journal they find among some ruins, an old man pulls aside the blind of his study window and watches the sun die.
This version of The House on the Borderland in PDF is our own edition from Project Aldus: the complete novel, with The Fragments and the editor's footnotes in place, set so you can read it straight through without tiring.
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The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson
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Information: The House on the Borderland
- Author: William Hope Hodgson.
- Publication Date: 1908.
- Main Characters:
- The Recluse: An old man who lives in the house with his sister and his dog, and whose journal makes up most of the novel.
- Mary: The Recluse's elderly sister and housekeeper, who shares the house with him during the siege.
- Pepper: The Recluse's dog and faithful companion through the attacks and the visions.
- Tonnison: The narrator's friend, who chose the fishing spot and helps find the manuscript in the ruins.
- The narrator: Tonnison's companion on the holiday, who tells how the manuscript was found and reads it aloud.
- The Swine-things: Pig-like creatures that come out of the pit and lay siege to the house.
- Brief Summary: Two friends on a fishing holiday near the remote Irish hamlet of Kraighten follow a nameless river until it plunges into a chasm, and among the ruins on its edge they find a small, damp book. It is the journal of an old man who lived in a strange house on that spot with his sister Mary and his dog Pepper. He writes of swine-like creatures that climb out of a pit near the house and lay siege to it, of a vision of a silent sea where he meets again the woman he loved and lost, and of a night when he watches from his study window as ages pass and the sun dies.
- Thematic Analysis: The House on the Borderland mixes two kinds of fear. One is close and physical: the Swine-things at the door, the pit under the house, the old man keeping watch at a window with a rifle. The other is cosmic: time running so fast that the earth, the sun and the whole solar system wear away while he watches. Hodgson ties them together with loneliness and loss, and leaves much unexplained, with damaged pages, gaps in the journal and an editor who can only guess. In his introduction he says each reader must uncover the inner story alone, and hints that it can be read as a picture of Heaven and Hell.
- Historical Context: William Hope Hodgson published The House on the Borderland in London in 1908, with Chapman & Hall. He had spent years at sea as a young man, and his fiction from those years mixes the ghost story with a sense of vast, indifferent time and space. The novel uses a frame familiar to Victorian and Edwardian readers, a found manuscript introduced by an editor, but takes it much further than the haunted-house tale, toward the cosmic horror that later writers such as H. P. Lovecraft would admire in it.