Fiction · 1908
The House on the Borderland
On a fishing trip in a remote part of Ireland, two friends find the crumbling foundations of a house beside a vast, unmapped chasm, and in the ruins, a water-stained manuscript left by a recluse who lived there with his sister and his dog, Pepper — until swine-like creatures began climbing out of the pit beneath his garden. Between their sieges, he is drawn into visions of the solar system burning down to its last ember, his house standing empty while the sun goes dark above it.
Published in 1908, the novel found its champion in H. P. Lovecraft, who singled it out in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature as one of the genre's finest achievements. Hodgson, a former merchant sailor, drew on the same sense of oceanic isolation that runs through his other nautical horror fiction.
Bibliomancer restores the 1908 text exactly as Hodgson wrote it.
Contents
- The House on the Borderland
- Author’s Introduction to the Manuscript
- I — The Finding of the Manuscript
- II — The Plain of Silence
- III — The House in the Arena
- IV — The Earth
- V — The Thing in the Pit
- VI — The Swine-Things
- VII — The Attack
- VIII — After the Attack
- IX — In the Cellars
- X — The Time of Waiting
- XI — The Searching of the Gardens
- XII — The Subterranean Pit
- XIII — The Trap in the Great Cellar
- XIV — The Sea of Sleep
- XV — The Noise in the Night
- XVI — The Awakening
- XVII — The Slowing Rotation
- XVIII — The Green Star
- XIX — The End of the Solar System
- XX — The Celestial Globes
- XXI — The Dark Sun
- XXII — The Dark Nebula
- XXIII — Pepper
- XXIV — The Footsteps in the Garden
- XXV — The Thing from the Arena
- XXVI — The Luminous Speck
- XXVII — Conclusion
- Footnotes
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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