The House on the Borderland
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The House on the Borderland is a supernatural horror novel by British fantasist William Hope Hodgson.
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Plot introduction
In 1877, two gentlemen, Messrs Tonnison and Berreggnog, head into Ireland to spend a week fishing in the village of Kraighten. Whilst there, they discover in the ruins of a very curious house a diary of the man who had once owned it. Its torn pages seem to hint at an evil beyond anything that existed on this side of the curtains of impossibility. This is a classic novel that worked to slowly bridge the gap between the British fantastic and supernatural authors of the later 19th century and modern horror fiction. Noted American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft lists this and other works by Hodgson among his greatest influences.
Plot summary
Two good friends, Tonnison and Berreggnog, travel to the remote village of Kraighten in rural Ireland. On the third day of their trip, they stumble upon the ruins of a strangely shaped house bordering a large lake. They discover the mouldering journal of the Recluse, an unidentified man who recorded his last days in the house before its destruction.
The Recluse begins his journal with descriptions of how he acquired the house, along with his daily life with his sister and his faithful dog, Pepper. He confides that he is starting the diary to record the strange experiences and horrors that were occurring in and around the house. The Recluse relates a vision in which he travels to a remote and vast arena, "the plain of silence," surrounded by mountains with representations of mythological beast-gods, demons, and other "bestial horrors" on their slopes. In the center of the plain stands a house almost identical to his own, save that the house in the arena is much larger and appears to be made of a green jade-like substance. Along the way, he sees a huge, menacing humanoid swine-thing.
After his vision of the "arena," he becomes fascinated with the pit adjacent to his house and begins to explore it. Shortly after this he is attacked by humanoid pig-like creatures that he names "the swine-things" which appear to have their origin from somewhere in the depths of a great chasm found under the house (accessed through a pit on the other side of the gardens) . The struggle with these creatures lasts for several nights of greater and greater ferocity, yet in the end, the man kills several of the swine things, and apparently drives them off. As he searches for the origin of the Swine-things, the man explores a pit in the gardens where the river ends and flows underground. There he finds a tunnel leading to a great chasm under the house. When rock slides dam the water in the pit, trapping the man, his dog Pepper rescues him. By the time that the two men find the journal, the obstructed water has overflowed the pit to create the lake.
The house transports him inter-dimensionally to an unknown place called 'the sea of sleep' where he briefly reunites with his lost love.
A short time later, the man notices that day and night have begun to speed up, eventually blurring into a never-ending dusk. As he watches, his surroundings decay and collapse to dust. The dead world slowly grinds to a halt as the sun goes out after several million millennia. Once the world ends, the man floats through space, seeing angelic, human, and demonic forms passing before his eyes. Later, he finds himself back in his own study on Earth, with everything apparently returned to normalcy—with the one exception of Pepper, who is dead.
To make matters worse, the malicious swine-beast from his earlier journeys to the 'arena' has managed to follow him back to his own dimension. The creature infects the man's new dog with a luminous fungal disease. Although the man shoots the suffering animal, he also contracts the disease. The manuscript ends with the man locked (from the outside only) in his study as the creature comes through a trap door in the basement, that opened directly over the chasm under the house.
Tonnison and Berreggnog search for information on the man and his circumstances. They find that the only knowledge of the house was that it was a place long of evil repute and had mysteriously fallen into the chasm. They leave Kraighten and never return.
Characters in The House on the Borderland
- Messrs Tonnison and Berreggnog: Two British gentleman who escape to Ireland for an enjoyable week of fishing.
- The Recluse: The author of the manuscript, an unknown man who owns the House on the Borderland, his narrative is the basis of the novel. He is a middle-aged, studious man who sought out the house as a place he could live out his days in quiet and solitude. He has an intellectual and rational view of the world that becomes shaken by his experiences. He is cared for by his elderly, spinster sister.
- Mary: The Recluse's old sister, she lives with him and acts as his housekeeper.
- Pepper: His dog, a large, sturdy, brave and loyal beast who does anything to help out his master, regardless of the danger.
- Unnamed woman/Lover: The former sweetheart of the Recluse, she had died years before he purchased the old house in Ireland (her exact marital status not given). The house's ability to transport him inter-dimensionally to her remote abode at 'the sea of sleep' is what holds him from leaving his house in Ireland. She warns him of the danger of remaining in his house and that it (and no doubt its counterpart "en-rapport" in the 'arena' many parsecs and dimensions removed) was 'long given over to evil and was founded on grim arcane laws'. Yet they both agree that were it not for the fantastic ability of his house to bring them together (in her dimension), they would never have been reunited.
- Large Swine-Thing: A humanoid bipedal creature with the repellent head and face of a huge swine; of malign appearance and intent, it glows with a shimmering phosphorescence. The creature briefly appears during the Recluse's first visit to the 'other' house in the remote arena of the 'plain of silence', and once more near the end of the narrative, having somehow crossed back to the dimension (Ireland) of the Recluse. It is also able to exert some telepathic or hypnotic influence over the Recluse.
- Swine-Things: Humanoid bipedal creatures with pallid-coloured pig-like heads and stature approximately the size of a grown man. They emerge from 'the pit' and make repeated stealthy attempts to break in to the house of the Recluse. They communicate with each other in a guttural and thick oleaginous speech which betokens a cunning sentience. Described by the Recluse as 'half-beast, half-something else, and entirely unholy' with eyes which betray a 'horribly human intelligence' ... 'superhumanly foul'.
- The Old House (on the inter-dimensional borderland): The old house is of such central importance to the story that it assumes something of a character's persona. The narrative of the Recluse informs us that the house has had a bad reputation for 200 years prior to his ownership (which is a few generations before the time of the book) and hence he acquired it for a ridiculously low price. Little else is revealed about its history, and the villagers of Kraighten (40 miles distant of Ardrahan, located somewhere in the west of Ireland) all shunned it and believed it to be haunted and that it 'was built by the Devil'. It is located a considerable distance downstream of the unnamed river near the village and is surrounded by a great garden. The stone house appears to have been built over a vast circular chasm (learned about half way through the journal), has a huge multiroom cellar embellished with weird fantastic sculptures, and is outwardly covered in 'little curved towers and pinnacles, with outlines suggestive of leaping flames .... while the body of the building is in the form of a circle'. As the title of the book hints, it is a "house on the borderland", a portal to other dimensions and serves as author Hodgson's means of transporting its owner the 'Recluse' (and readers of the story) over vast distances of space and time. The house is linked to a larger counterpart with which it is 'en-rapport'; located on a distant world (either in another dimension or at the other 'end' of this universe). When Tonnison and Berreggnog discover the house (in Ireland) it has fallen into 'the chasm'. All that is left is an overgrown wilderness of a once-great garden estate and a small fragment of what was (probably) the study, on a huge spur of rock which juts out over a vast circular chasm. The story then becomes a flashback or framed narrative via the journal of the Recluse discovered by them in the ruins.
Literary significance & criticism
The book is a milestone that signals a radical departure from the typical Gothic supernatural fiction of the late 19th century. Hodgson creates a newer more realistic/scientific cosmic horror that left a marked impression on the people who would become the great writers of the weird tales of the middle of the 20th century, most notably Clark Ashton Smith, and H. P. Lovecraft.
Release details
This novel was first published in Britain by Chapman and Hall, Ltd. London in 1908. Its most popular version was by Arkham House Press, Sauk City, Wisconsin, in 1946 as part of The House on the Borderland and Other Novels, the same publishers that brought out many books by other authors of weird fiction, such as H. P. Lovecraft.
Adaptations
The book was adapted to become the basic plot of Sam Raimi's cult classic film The Evil Dead (1981).
In 2003 DC Comics’ mature reader imprint Vertigo published a 96-page color graphic-novel adaptation The House on the Borderland, with story by Simon Revelstroke and art by Richard Corben. The book is available in soft and hardcover and contains an introduction by British comic writer Alan Moore. Revelstroke updated Hodgson's initial "manuscript discovery" frame to 1952 Ireland, and while he made an effort to retain most of the original plot and dialogue, excepting the very last page the climax is purely Revelstroke's invention. In the credits, Revelstroke listed himself as a "Carnacki Fellow" currently "teaching at the Glen Carrig School of Nautical Horticulture", both direct (and fictional) references to Hodgson's other literary works. The adaptation was nominated for Best Graphic Novel of the Year by the International Horror Guild.
