The House on the Borderland

I had been staying just within the shadow of the exit of the great rift. Now, without volition on my part, I drifted out of the semi-darkness and began to move slowly—toward the House.

Amidst the din of roaring water, in a chasm where a house once stood in an isolated corner of Ireland, a manuscript is discovered entitled The House on the Borderland. Penned by the enigmatic Recluse, it tells of a revelatory descent into the uncanny. For the Recluse seems to have discovered another land and in it another House; a jade-green double of his own in a realm rife with beasts and cosmic beings without name, encroaching on the bounds of reality itself.

With a new introduction by Ann VanderMeer exploring why Hodgson’s tale is the ‘perfect embodiment of a weird novel’, this edition of the 1908 cult classic still thrums with the visionary energy which influenced countless writers including H. P. Lovecraft and Terry Pratchett.

WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON (1877–1918) was a novelist and short-story writer whose pioneering works such as The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” (1907) and The Night Land (1912) are now regarded as foundation texts in the history of weird fiction.

Ann VanderMeer is an American publisher and editor, and the second female editor of the horror magazine Weird Tales. She is the founder of Buzzcity Press. Work from her press and related periodicals has won the British Fantasy Award, the International Rhysling Award, and appeared in several years' best anthologies. She lives in Tallahassee.