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Welcome to the discussion of The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson, originally published in 1908. Free online from the usual sources, including a librivox audio here: . It's a relatively short book, touted as horror... enjoy!

I am in on this one.

I just finished it. It seems more horror (Lovecraftian style) than SF, even if there are some SF themes - (view spoiler)[travel to other worlds (planets?), time travel, dying stars (hide spoiler)]

I'm 40% in. It is a pleasant read. Not overwhelming, but that may follow. Until now it is a quite simple horror story including indeed some wandering in space. What I read of Lovecraft, his stories were more complex. But this is older, author died in WWI.

I'm going to start listening to the Librivox edition this afternoon.

I got through it & recognize its influence, but more on fantasy, horror, & S&S than SF. I didn't care for it much. If most of the second part had been edited out, I wouldn't have missed it in this particular book, but many others I've enjoyed would have been poorer for its absence. I gave it a 3 star review here:
/review/show...

Great review, Jim!

Thanks. I wish I had enjoyed it more. I don't think I would have gotten through it in text. A GR friend of mine says he had a lot of trouble not skimming through the last half.

My brief review: /review/show...

By the way do you think that it is a Greek mythology allusion? (view spoiler)[when the hero meets his dead love near the river. (hide spoiler)]

I think so, Oleksandr. If you haven't read Creatures of Light and Darkness, I'd recommend it if only for how much it owes to this book. It's one of my favorites, although it's weird. Much more readable than this one.

Jim wrote: "I think so, Oleksandr. If you haven't read Creatures of Light and Darkness, I'd recommend it."

I DNFed it as a teen, it was just too strange. I will have it on my reading list, thanks!

It is strange. He actually didn't intend to publish it, but an editor talked him into it. He wrote it as an experimental piece for himself. I find it bewildering & fascinating.

Just finished this and posted a review. While reviews have to consider impact on other readers, resulting in a ** review, personally I would say that I'm glad I read it and will read other work by William Hope Hodgson.

I can enjoy the transportation to the era old books were written in, but many readers just want their mind to be well fed with expecations, and old works don't often accomplish that.

Good review & you made some excellent points, Dave. I agree with you about the astronomy. I did & do try to remember the era, although I can't say I'd thought about how the dream sequences would have been better way back then. Perhaps, but I think they appeal to some people more than others. Lovecraft certainly did well with his, but I've never cared much for his work, either.

A side note - what do you think was the idea behind different suns?

Finished it. I had difficulties staying concentrated during the long trip in space in the second part of the book. I guess that for that time it was sufficient enough to keep the readers happy. I have nothing to add to your reviews, Jim, Oleksandr, Dave, well put.

Oleksandr wrote: "A side note - what do you think was the idea behind different suns?"
--Spoilerish--
I believe I read that the green sun and his dark twin brother were kind of the center of the universe, attracting all dying stars, like a black hole.

Looks like this is a 2 star read for us all. I gave it 3 stars, the extra due to its influence on later works.

I wondered if there was some sort of good-evil symbolism behind the 2 stars, but couldn't grasp it if there was. Does anyone know what the scientific thinking was about the center of the universe at the time?

As Dave pointed out in his review, the monsters are never explained. They're piggish & pretty horrible. I wonder why pigs have such a bad name. What were their motives?

The house & it's connection to the other one reminds me a bit of Amber & the shadows it casts. I wonder if that was one of Zelazny's inspirations.

Leo wrote: "I believe I read that the green sun and his dark twin brother were kind of the center of the universe, attracting all dying stars, like a black hole. "

From wiki:
Objects whose gravitational fields are too strong for light to escape were first considered in the 18th century by John Michell and Pierre-Simon Laplace.[7] The first modern solution of general relativity that would characterize a black hole was found by Karl Schwarzschild in 1916, although its interpretation as a region of space from which nothing can escape was first published by David Finkelstein in 1958. Black holes were long considered a mathematical curiosity; it was during the 1960s that theoretical work showed they were a generic prediction of general relativity. The discovery of neutron stars in the late 1960s sparked interest in gravitationally collapsed compact objects as a possible astrophysical reality.

So it is unlikely that the author actually meant a black hole, as the concept was popularized much later. I see it like a duality and maybe "black sun world" as an allusion to hell

Jim wrote: "As Dave pointed out in his review, the monsters are never explained. They're piggish & pretty horrible. I wonder why pigs have such a bad name. What were their motives?"

I guess pigs are 'earthy' things, without 'noble spirits' as it was understood at the time. Also I wonder whether they can be linked to the contemporary understanding of Neanderthal - no chin, 'primitive'

Rethinking it, maybe the black sun must be our own dead sun... as I said I had trouble to concentrate on that part :-) EDIT and there is also a huge black sun. Confusing...
But this is the part from which I concluded it must have been sort of a black hole:
"And then, suddenly, an extraordinary question rose in my mind, whether this stupendous globe of green fire might not be the vast Central Sun—the great sun, 'round which our universe and countless others revolve. I felt confused. I thought of the probable end of the dead sun, and another suggestion came, dumbly—Do the dead stars make the Green Sun their grave? The idea appealed to me with no sense of grotesqueness; but rather as something both possible and probable."

Leo wrote: "Do the dead stars make the Green Sun their grave? "

As I understand it is assumed that starts slowly burn out (remember, no nuclear fission knowledge then) and gravity pulls them together to the center of our galaxy. Maybe the Central star is green because the author links green to life?

Oleksandr wrote: "Maybe the Central star is green because the author links green to life..."
Could be. Or maybe he was just looking for a strange colour and could it also have been purple. The book has the reader questioning a lot of things, Jim mentioned a few. Just maybe the author did not have intentions with everything he wrote, other than to make the reader wonder.

Leo wrote: "Just maybe the author did not have intentions with everything he wrote, other than to make the reader wonder. "

Yes, this is always an option. There is a similar over-scrutinizing in arts sometimes :)

Exactly, I was thinking of arts too!

Another interesting point - what do you think is the meaning of a copy of the author's castle on another world, surrounded by gods (idols? heathen gods?) - is it once again a sliver of hell?

I thought perhaps the castle was the real one. Not really home of the gods, but the wellspring of our reality. The author's home was a reflection of it & that's why the pig-things were attracted to it. Sort of a back door into our reality or something. I never did get that to make sense, although I thought it had interesting associations with Amber & the Black Road.

I have just finished and found it an interesting read, even though it did jump all over the place. His lost love seems to just appear out of nowhere.

I've only read about 1/4 of it so far. It is exactly like I expected it to be. A lot of "spooky" atmosphere, florid purple prose, and not much actually happening. I'll probably continue reading it, but not very enthusiastically.

I was really enjoying the book, but I did get bogged down at the end when time sped up and the solar system died. It was excruciating to read through to the end when that poor dog was left outside, defenseless, at the mercy of that creature.

Oh, tx for the reminder, I gotta get to this!

I'm intrigued by the others' reactions to what's going on. The narrator himself wonders, for example, why his sister isn't more perturbed (after he 'gets back' from his nightmare journey)... why she isn't bothered by the new dog's glowing wound.

Thank you all for your careful reviews. After reading them, I don't feel, as much, as if I wasted time reading the story.

Cheryl wrote: "why his sister isn't more perturbed (after he 'gets back' from his nightmare journey)... why she isn't bothered by the new dog's glowing wound."

And he is more concerned about his dog than about his sister.

True. Of course, Pepper seems more useful in a crisis.

Though without servants, the sister must have been pretty run-down.

I felt bad for the sister. At one point the narrator comments that he sometimes doesn't come out of his study for several days at a time. The house is quite isolated and they have no staff, so she is completely alone, in a place she doesn't seem to really want to be, with a brother who must appear to her to be slowly going mad. At the end, the companion animals who would have given her comfort also die/are destroyed. Back in those days, a woman couldn't just head out on her own-- she was totally dependent in her brother, stuck in a position where her opinion didn't matter or wasn't asked for.

In the Q&A section at this book on GR (/questions/8...)
I found a suggested explanation for the apparently non-participating sister. I think this could be a good explanation. What do you think?

Leo wrote: "In the Q&A section at this book on GR (/questions/8...)
I found a suggested explanation for the apparently non-participating si..."

Those explanations do make sense. I always found it odd that the sister seemed to be unaware of the pig-creature attacks. Does that mean that the narrator hurt and killed the family pets himself, or is there something more going on?

Leo wrote: "In the Q&A section at this book on GR "

It is an interesting view and it does explain a lot, but it lessens the overall scope of the story

The sister did exist - at least some old lady was taken in by the guy that brought supplies. We find that out at the end. Exactly how long she lived after that is open to speculation along with almost everything else.

"Gradually, a peculiar uneasiness seized me. I became aware of a growing feeling of repugnance and dread."

And I still had 10 more chapters to go.

One of the reviewers on this site said "The time lapse sequence is DECADES ahead of its time."

I have to disagree. H.G. Wells did that better in The Time Machine, 10 years earlier.

I can admire this book as an influence on Lovecraft and other Weird Fiction. But I also don't enjoy Lovecraft, so it just isn't for me. It is a whole bunch of spooky atmosphere, but no real story.

Ed wrote: "I have to disagree. H.G. Wells did that better in The Time Machine, 10 years earlier..."

I agree, his space/dimensional travels are maybe unique for the time, but 'speed up time' was made by Wells

I just read a graphic novel adaptation by Richard Corben and Simon Revelstroke.

It felt pretty different. I kept thinking, I don't remember that! Or that! Or, .... Wait a minute! That definitely didn't happen. They made a ton of changes which totally change the feel of the story. And, it actually helps. The changes bring the story up from 2 stars to 3!

There is a lot more action. A lot more fighting against pig-men.

Mary, the sister character, gets a lot more to do. Unfortunately, though, an incest angle is added. At the start of the found manuscript, the man talks of an incestuous love, but all in the past. When the fighting starts, Mary proves to be just as good at shooting and axing the pig-men as the man, but she gets bitten. Then she becomes a sex-starved zombie. Oy!

The guys who found the manuscript get a more complete story, too. One of them goes insane and ends in an asylum. The townspeople are killed en masse by the pig men.

Even though the story still has problems, at least stuff actually happens. So 3 stars instead of 2.

They really should have changed the title and just said "Inspired by...."