The House on the Borderland

Penguin Weird Fiction- a celebration of the very best of the weird, a store of novels and tales that for generations have delighted and horrified.

A manuscript is found. Filled with small, precise writing and smelling of pit-water, it tells the story of an old recluse and his strange home – and it’s even stranger, jade-green double, seen by that old man on an otherworldly plain where gigantic gods and monsters roam. Soon his earthly abode is no less terrible than this strange vision, as swine-like creatures boil from a cavern beneath the ground and besiege it. But a still greater horror will face the recluse, one more awful than any creature that can be fought or killed.

The House on the Borderland, William Hope Hodgson’s great masterpiece of cosmic fear, is an extraordinary novel that defied all accepted conventions of horror writing, forging in an instant a new, weird direction for the form.

Author Biography

William Hope Hodgson (1877 – 1918) was born in Essex, England, but moved often throughout his childhood, including time in County Galway, Ireland, the setting of his most famous work, The House on the Borderland. He became a sailor at an early age, and his experiences at sea were an enormous influence on his later writing. His novels and stories centre themselves on vast expanses and the dread of unknown depths, frequently combining elements of horror, science fiction, and the occult, and proved immensely significant to future writers of Weird Fiction. He died in battle during WW1.