The House on the Borderland

The House on the Borderland is a supernatural horror novel published in 1908 by the British writer William Hope Hodgson. Its structure takes the form of a discovery: two men on a fishing trip in remote western Ireland come upon a strange chasm and, on a rocky spur above it, some ruins containing a journal. That journal, written by a recluse who lives with his sister and his dog in a circular, ill-reputed house, forms the bulk of the book.

The narrator describes how, one night while reading, the candles burn first green and then red, and his mind is carried off to a vast empty plain beneath a sun of flame. There he sees a jade replica of his own house set among mountains lined with idols of beast-gods, and he faces swine-headed creatures trying to force their way into the building. Later, pale-skinned beings emerge from a nearby pit and besiege the house, while time, in a sequence of cosmic visions, speeds up until the end of the solar system.

The book marked a notable break from the typical Gothic fiction of the late nineteenth century, proposing a more abstract and, in a sense, more scientific cosmic horror. Its influence was considerable among the weird-fiction writers of the mid-twentieth century, especially H. P. Lovecraft, who praised it at length after encountering Hodgson's novels in 1934.