The House on the Borderland

By: William Hope Hodgson

Narrated by: John Rayburn

This is a very unusual book, wherein the majority of the story is contents of an ancient diary found by two friends on a fishing holiday while on the grounds of an old dilapidated house. The moldy manuscript has inscribed tales of strange things seen and heard. There are horrible creatures and huge monsters described as though they were old gods of mythology.

They find stories saying the devil may have built the house. While reading the tattered and torn manuscript the two vacationers are startled by extremely unusual lights and sounds on the grounds and also in and around the building that is in a state of disrepair or ruin as a result of age or neglect. Much of the written material influences the men as they shudder at what seem to be supernatural manifestations. Later on they frequently have dreams of an eternal shroud of spray.

This tale was first published more than a century ago in 1908 but retains the appeal of stories by author William Hope Hodgson, still a leading name in exceptional weird fiction.

Public Domain (P)2023 John D. Rayburn

weird story by weirder reader

The good is that this weird tale of a house at the end of creation borrows widely from other writers of weird fiction, including Edgar Allan Poe. Encounters with pig-like creatures and mesmeric forces are some of the most vivid passages. The protagonist within the frame narrative (his story contained in a manuscript found by the initial narrator) remains a consistently empathetic puzzler of problems trying to do the right thing for himself, his sister, and the world.

The bad is that several chapters at the end of the story [SPOILER ALERT] recount the protagonist's experience of timeless awareness of the cosmos that while listening felt, as in the story, like it went on forever. As these chapters washed over me I really missed those pig-men, but I understand why H. P. Lovecraft would adore the direction this tale went.

The ugly, though also hilarious, was how often the reader would make a mistake, take a breath, and reread the flubbed line with renewed gusto. I confess that these serial misreadings, unabridged and intact, only whetted my curiosity about what else could go wrong. I found out when chapter 19 was skipped entirely and replaced by chapter 20 being read twice in a row.

Hodgson adored Poe so much that he copied a scene from Poe's Pym in which the protagonist, lost in a dark place, encounters a mysterious creature that he fails to recognize, for several pages, as his own dog. I wonder if this is an uncatalogued sub-genre of weird fiction-- the shaggy dog that's my dog story.