A romance of the far future in which humankind has relocated underground where it is beset by
monsters from another dimension—but love leads on. In the far future humankind’s survivors
huddle below Earth’s frozen surface in a pyramidal fortress-city that for centuries now has
been under siege by loathsome Ab-humans ” enormous slugs and spiders and malevolent Watching
Things” from another dimension. When our unnamed protagonist receives a telepathic distress
signal from a woman whom (in a previous incarnation) he’d once loved he sallies forth on an
ill-advised rescue mission—into the fiend-haunted Night Land! Like certain rare dreams ” C. S.
Lewis wrote of Hodgson’s masterpiece The Night Land can give sensations we never had before
and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience.” H. P. Lovecraft agreed that
this is one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written.” William Hope
Hodgson (1877–1918) was an English poet sailor bodybuilder and weird fiction pioneer whose
horror fantastic and proto-sf novels—in addition to The Night Land—include The Boats of the
Glen Carrig” (1907) The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Ghost Pirates (1909). He also
wrote stories in the Sargasso Sea series the Captain Gault series and a series about the
occult detective Carnacki.
