The Night Land

The Night Land is a book written by William Hope Hodgeson which is utterly stunning in it's vision, scope and cruelty while at the same time falling prey to an awful writing style and a stilted, farsicle romance.

Written in 1912 the author somehow manages to clearly imagine a sunless, hopeless, chilly future wherein the "final millions" of the Earth crowd tougether in an 8 mile high Pyramid made of metal. Against this great fortress the powers of darkness aways sit, wait, and watch. From the great pryamid at all times the masses of people can eye the watchers, huge motionless Godzilla-like nightmares that at all times are waiting for the forcefield protecting those final millions to fail or falter. All around the pyramid myriad horrors half-manifest in the darkness, threatening dangerous possbilities to this last base of mankind.

This is where the book is at it's most sucessful and why I recommend it for a very slow read. The feeling of a watching breathing doom, which never sleeps or rests but only stares is the jewl of the text. One must wonder as he wrote this if he wasn't thinking of the final conflicts between Germany, England, France and Italy that would ultimately result in 9 million pointless deaths.

The feeling of being balanced perilously in the middle of the dark nothing is well alive in the text. Add to this a great amount of very origional and iteresting ideas (I wouldn't mention everything in a review, should I?) then we have a far-seeing work, if not of prophecy, of real psychological horror.

Of the negative points I will very breifly speak. They are legion. The book is written in a childish attempt at 17th century prose. That is all of the difficulty and none of the depth. The plot itself is pretty simple (the world is more interesting by far than the plot). The love story featured prominently in the work is NAUSEATING becuase it is so saccharine. However, if you can survive all these tortures (I recommend reading slowly and possibly skipping the first non-sequitur of a chapter) then you can read the book.

You don't even have to buy it. Google has it here: http://books.google.cl/books?id=eITGn5W3q5wC&dq=The+night+land&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=es&ei=h7_PSvinI5HO8QaV5tXuAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCAQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Happy readings!