The House on the Borderland

Author: Hope Hodgson, William

Classic fiction (pre c 1945)

Published on 17 October 2024 by Penguin Books Ltd in the United Kingdom as part of 'the Weird Fiction' series.

Penguin Weird Fiction: a celebration of the very best of the weird, a store of novels and tales that for generations have delighted and horrified.

A manuscript is found. Filled with small, precise writing and smelling of pit-water, it tells the story of an old recluse and his strange home – and it’s even stranger, jade-green double, seen by that old man on an otherworldly plain where gigantic gods and monsters roam. Soon his earthly abode is no less terrible than this strange vision, as swine-like creatures boil from a cavern beneath the ground and besiege it. But a still greater horror will face the recluse, one more awful than any creature that can be fought or killed.

The House on the Borderland, William Hope Hodgson’s great masterpiece of cosmic fear, is an extraordinary novel that defied all accepted conventions of horror writing, forging in an instant a new, weird direction for the form.

'Forget vampires and gore . . . this is where the screaming really starts, out in the void, with no one left to hear' Terry Pratchett