This book is in Gollancz’s series of backlist reprints under the heading of ‘Fantasy Masterworks’. It contains four novels; ‘The Boats of the Glen Carrig’, ‘The House on the Borderlands’, ‘The Ghost Pirates’ and ‘The Night Land’. It has an introduction by China Miéville.

‘The Boats of the Glen Carrig’ starts with a group of shipwreck survivors already in the lifeboats and looking for a safer landfall. The first land they find is anything but safe; later, they leave that place, survive a storm and finally sail through a sea of vegetation to find an island where they can plan their escape from danger. In between times, they endure attacks by a variety of strange sea creatures. Miéville's introduction warned me that Hodgson indulged in nautical techno-babble (and provided a hilarious example of such from Jonathan Swift), but despite that and the relative simplicity of the plot, the imagery is remarkable. But the imagery is just plonked into the story for effect – ‘we rowed past this ship that was in the grip of a giant octopus’ sort of thing. It’s utterly memorable; but as for where the giant octopus came from, why it was attacking the ship, or indeed where any of the weird and not-so-wonderful creatures came from is never made clear. They are just strange things that happen at sea. Indeed, this seems to be a recurrent theme in Hodgson’s writing, as we shall see. Also a recurrent theme is the sudden reveal, although these are not exactly gasp-inducing plot twists. Towards the end, we find out that our narrator was a passenger on board the 'Glen Carrig', not one of the crew. Lest anyone accuse me of dropping spoilers into the discussion, let me add that that does not affect the plot one tiny bit.

Some of the same recurrent themes can be found in ‘The House on the Borderland' itself. It’s a strange tale about an abandoned house somewhere in rural Ireland, told in flashback via an abandoned journal. The occupant of the house encounters strange visitations from savage creatures, experiences accelerated time and undertakes (psychic?) voyages to other realms and distant planets. Hodgson appears minimal on explanation but his scene-setting and imagery is powerful. There is an impressive sense of place, but as for plot? Denouement? Answers? Questions, even? The protagonist is horrified by the attacks he suffers and the things he sees, but the creeping horrors that keep occurring have no apparent origin and the protagonist never seeks an explanation for these events. The story never gets to the bottom of them (or, indeed, shows any sign of wanting to get to the bottom of them).

If nothing else, 'The House on the Borderlands' has acquired an iconic reputation as the stylistic progenitor of a lot of fantasy and horror writing. I found the imagery striking.

The third novel is ‘The Ghost Pirates’; and because Hodgson seemed to be working at slightly longer length in this one, the weirdness quotient doesn't ramp up all that quickly, though he keeps saying "Something truly uncanny then happened..." and then it's only slightly odd - nothing hair-raising the way it was in ‘The Boats of the Glen Carrig’. Mind you, it shares that story's load of naval proto-technobabble and I kept thinking of Edmund Blackadder's encounter with Sir Walter Raleigh "and his Golden BeHind". And guess what? The ghosts turned out to be pirates at the end, after all! Hodgson pulls another reveal out of the hat in this one; the narrator turns out to have his mate's ticket, but that hardly really influences what happens even though the ship's captain suggests it might. The story ends very suddenly. All die. O the embarrassment (as Joe Haldeman once wrote).

Finally we come to ‘The Night Land’. This has an unpromising start with a love story set at some point in Olde Englande, but then the object of the narrator’s love dies and he experiences a vision of a distant future time and a similarly distant future existence. We are supposed to accept that the protagonist and his One True Love share souls across time, and indeed this provides a motivation for the future protagonist’s actions. But really, this was not necessary. Viewed as a story set at the far end of time, when the sun has died and the Earth is plunged into eternal night, the story could stand on its own in those terms. After all, ‘The Night Land’ dates from 1912, yet Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’ was written in 1909 and quite happily plunged the reader into a future time without any framing device connecting it to the present day.

All the same elements that we have already seen in the other novels are present here: weird creatures of unknown origin and savage intent; strange situations; striking imagery. Yet this all works; the beasts and altered men of ‘The Night Land’ don’t need any explanation because they are not located in the world we know. And Hodgson introduces what must be science fiction’s first megastructure; we are some way into the story before we realise that the Last Redoubt, the great pyramid housing the remaining humans on Earth, is several miles high and of similarly impressive footprint; Hodgson describes the mechanisms of the Pyramid in some detail. In so many ways, the story provides a foretaste of later works by other hands – Yevgeny Zamyatin’s ‘We’, Algis Budrys’ ‘Rogue Moon’ and the Strugatsky brothers’’ ‘Roadside Picnic’ all came to mind at different times.

Yet the novel is written in the same cod-archaic language (as Miéville so tellingly describes it) as the first Olde Englishe chapter; and this gets very irritating very quickly. Our super-competent hero – possibly channelling the author’s fascination with physical fitness and body images – evades all the horrors and perils of the setting to rescue a survivor from a forgotten outstation of the Redoubt. This survivor turns out to be another incarnation of the Best Belovéd from the first chapter, and the description of the relationship between this survivor and our hero rapidly turns increasingly toe-curling in its tweeness. Of course, the hero’s attitude to this woman is typical of its time – there is a sequence of corporal punishment that we would find totally unacceptable today – so it is refreshing when the Belovéd suddenly displays a feisty side. But sadly, this is only temporary.

I ended up skimming the text as life was too short for all the cod-archaic language and all the stuff about 'Mine Own Belovéd". But the pace increases as the protagonists get nearer to their goal, their return to the Pyramid; I was torn between rushing to the end just to get the novel finished with and actually wanting to see how it ended and whether there would be a happy ending or not.

‘The Night Land’ is probably the most iconic of the four novels in this omnibus; the world-building (well, dismantling, really) and the visual descriptions are stunning. It would actually film rather well, I think; a film adaptation could make the female protagonist a lot tougher, and easily cut out the reams of superfluous material and drill down to the weird and visually stunning adventure story underneath. ( )

I only read the title story this time. One of the first fantasy novels with a dreamlike narrative. Some logical inconsistencies but they do not spoil the tale.
An original, and when I have time I intend to go back to the other stories.
addendum
Now I've looked at the other reviews I think I will give 'The Night Land' a miss and just read the other two books in this omnibus. ( )

The Boats of the "Glen Carrig"

Only 100 pages long, this is a tale of mystery and danger on the high seas. After the sinking of the ship Glen Carrig, two boats carrying her surviving crew and passengers find themselves in dire straits. Attacked by monstrous devil-fish and unseen dangers lurking in the darkness, as well as the expected dangers of storms and running out of food and drinking water, they have only their own ingenuity and the experience of the cool-headed bo'sun to bring them to safety.

I liked it a lot, and my book contains four novels by this author so I have three more to look forward to.

The House on the Borderland

It was undoubtedly a portion of a ruined building; yet now I made out that it was not built upon the edge of the chasm itself, as I had first supposed; but perched almost at the extreme end of a huge spur of rock that jutted out some fifty or sixty feet over the abyss. In fact, the jagged mass of ruin was literally suspended in mid-air.

Two friends on a camping and fishing holiday in the West of Ireland find a battered notebook containing an unbelievable story in the ruins of a house suspended over a chasm, and pass it to William Hope Hodgson to edit and publish.

In the notebook, a past owner of the house describes mystical visions in which he travels vast distances through space and time. He also tells of encounters with the mysterious and possibly non-corporeal swine-creatures that attack his house, which seem to come from the bowels of the earth.

I found this an involving story, but not as exciting as his tales of the sea.

The Ghost Pirates

I joined the Mortzestus in 'Frisco. I heard before I signed on, that there were some funny yarns floating round about her; but I was pretty nearly on the beach, and too jolly anxious to get away, to worry about trifles. Besides, by all accounts, she was right enough so far as grub and treatment went. When I asked fellows to give it a name, they generally could not. All they could tell me, was that she was unlucky, and made thundering long passages, and had no more than a fair share of dirty weather. Also, that she had twice had the sticks blown out of her, and her cargo shifted. Besides all these, a heap of other things that might happen to any packet, and would not be comfortable to run into. Still, they were the ordinary things, and I was willing enough to risk thern, to get home. All the same, if I had been given the chance, I should have shipped in some other vessel as a matter of preference.

When the ship Mortzestus takes on a new crew at San Francisco, only one sailor remains from the previous voyage. His crew-mates left without their pay, but Williams is determined to stay long enough to get his pay-packet, even though he claims that the Mortzestus is an unlucky ship with too many shadows.

Jessop is the first of the new crew to notice anything odd, when he sees a shadowy figure climbing over the rails. Events build up slowly at first, and Jessop is not sure who else has noticed what is going on, but one terrifying night things escalate and half the crew, including the Second Mate and even the Skipper, end up climbing the rigging looking for a sailor who has disappeared up above, burning flares and blue-lights (whatever they may be) and hanging lanterns around the ship in an attempt to hold back the danger that lurks in the darkness.

William Hope Hodgson spent ten years at sea, and this story really rings true (except for the ghost pirates obviously). A scary, exciting and moving tale.

Edited 10/12/2015: I finally got round to Googling blue-lights, and according to Wikipedia "Blue light is an archaic signal, the progenitor of modern pyrotechnic flares. Blue light consists of a loose, chemical composition burned in an open, hand-held hemispherical wooden cup."

The Night Land

And thus, in a while were they watched by all the mighty multitudes of the Great Pyramid, through millions of spy-glasses; for each human had a spying-glass, as may be thought; and some were an hundred years old, and some, maybe ten thousand, and handed down through many generations; and some but newly made, and very strange. But all those people had some instrument by which they might spy out upon the wonder of the Night Land; for so had it been ever through all the eternity of darkness, and a great diversion and wonder of life was it to behold the monsters about their work; and to know that they plotted always to our destruction; yet were ever foiled.

The first three stories in my Fantasy Masterworks copy of "The House in the Borderland and Other Novels" are really novellas, being barely 100 pages long, but this final tale is much longer. Unfortunately the reason that "The Night Land" is so much longer is due to the unnecessarily convoluted olde worlde language, which makes it a slow and tortuous read, or rather "that which does thus render it both slow and tortuous to read thereof". Since this book was written by an Edwardian man, I might have expected that sexism would still be going strong at the end of the world, but the way the protagonist describes Mine Own (who apparently is demure and loving but also impertinent, perverse and in need of a good whipping) is still exceedingly annoying

However the Night Land itself and the long journey of the protagonist through the landscape are mesmerising (while being tediously repetitive in parts) and even though it took about 10 times as long to read as a normal book of that length, I was never tempted to give up. The last remaining human beings on the dying earth live in impregnable pyramids in a hostile landscape, and are menaced by ab-humans and monstrous beings when they venture outside, and I just had to know whether the hero would manage to rescue the woman he loved and her companions from the Lesser Refuge and bring them back to the Great Redoubt.

And this thing did strike me very solemn, as I did lie; and I do trust that you conceive how that there was, in truth, afar above in the eternal and unknown night, the stupendous desolation of the dead world, and the eternal snow and starless dark. And, as I do think, a cold so bitter that it held death to all living that should come anigh to it. Yet, bethink you, if one had lived in that far height of the dead world, and come upon the edge of that mighty valley in which all life that was left of earth, did abide, they should have been like to look downward vaguely into so monstrous a deep that they had seen naught, mayhaps, save a dull and utter strange glowing far downward in the great night, in this place and in that. ( )

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/houseontheborderland.htm

This volume gathers together all four of William Hope Hodgson's novels of the fantastic published in his lifetime (1877-1918): The Boats of the Glen Carrig, originally published in 1907; The House on the Borderland (1908); The Ghost Pirates (1909) and The Night Land (1912). It's in the usual attractive Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks package, with a very enthusiastic introduction from China Miéville. The back cover mangles a quotation from H.P. Lovecraft; what he actually said, with respect to The House on the Borderland, was "But for a few touches of commonplace sentimentality this book would be a classic of the first water" and it is rather cheeky of Gollancz to use only the last six words.

Though Lovecraft was being a bit unfair. The House on the Borderland certainly is a classic, and though it is the shortest of the four novels it is far and away the best. The plot is very simple: Hodgson presents himself as the editor of a manuscript found by two friends camping in the ruins of an old house in a remote spot in the west of Ireland, supposedly forty miles from the nearest railway station (an impossible feat in the well-networked Ireland of 1877, I should think). The manuscript descibes the experiences of the previous owner of the house; he is attacked by pig-creatures from a pit in the grounds which apparently leads to another dimension, and then experiences a rapid fast-forward through the heat death of the universe. The writing is vivid and at the same time surreal. There is no apparent causal relationship between the events and no explanation. But it stays with you, and was clearly an inspiration for Lovecraft despite his begrudging comment.

Lovecraft is not the only one. This story forms part of the hinterland of many genre works, most explicitly in Roger Zelazny's The Changing Land, where the House on the Borderland, renamed the Castle Timeless, is recognisably at the centre of a wizardly contest, one of the wizards bearing the name of Hodgson; at the end of the book, he looks out the castle window "across a very green land towards the misty mountains". Brian Stableford rescues the historical Hodgson from his historical death in the trenches to send him back to Ireland in The Gateway of Eternity, and Ian Sinclair's Radon Daughters revolves around a contemporary quest for Hodgson's manuscript of the sequel to The House on the Borderland. No doubt there are others I have missed.

According to leading Hodgsonologists, the two sea stories in this collection, The Boats of the Glen Carrig and The Ghost Pirates, may actually have been the last two written (though the first and third published) as their author realised that there was more of a market for nautical novels with a fantastic twist than simply novels of the fantastic. They therefore represent an attempt by the author to get in on the market for boys' adverntures opened up in the late nineteenth century by Robert Louis Stevenson, R.M. Ballantyne, G.A. Henty, Captain Marryat and the like. But both stories involve bizarre encounters with the supernatural on the high seas, and are written far more intensely than their Victorian precursors could have imagined. Together with The House on the Borderland, they make up a very good package, excellent value (especially when one considers that some publishers are marketing single novellas for twice the price of this 630-page volume).

But wait, there's more. Oh dear. Over half of this volume is taken up by The Night Land, the last published (though, according to some, the first written) of the four novels; it is hundreds of pages of pure awfulness. China Miéville disarmingly admits in his introduction that its faults are "manifold and obvious", adds that it "stretches mercilessly" and speculates that "If a committee had been set up to design an unreadable book, they'd probably have come up with The Night Land." He then tries to persuade us to read it anyway. I simply couldn't. The style of The Night Land is so abysmal - an attempt to do Samuel Pepys in telegraphic mode, perhaps - that I found it, once put down, impossible to pick up again. Never mind, there are three excellent novels here, each of which has three times the quality of many Big Commercial Fantasies of the same size. Recommended. ( )