A descent into hell turns into a space-time wandering. On the threshold of the twentieth century, the traditional katabasis is now tinged with the gloomy hues of already Einsteinian cosmicism. In a universe that has lost its center for centuries, WH Hodgson tries for the last time to get an overview of the Whole. The vision that he gives us is that of a universe without holds, in perennial decay, dominated by unknown forces that embody chaos and death, anticipating what will be the typical nightmares of HP Lovecraft's sepulchral nihilism.
di Andrew Casella
cover: Ed Emshwiller, "The House in the Borderland"
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Β« You must have spent an eternity in the
silence of absolute darkness, to understand
the full horror of being devoid of light. Β»WH Hodgson, The house on the abyss
The house on the abyss. A title that the average reader of HP Lovecraft it won't sound foreign at all. Great is the tribute that the master of Providence owes to the novel-masterpiece of the Briton William Hope Hodgson (1877 - 1918), if only for the reason that the frightening house reappears in some stories of his dream cycle, and especially in The mysterious house up there in the fog, story immersed in the mists of dream, from which the house emerges, whose door, phantasmagorically, opens directly onto a sheer cliff overlooking Kingsport. With a decisive reversal of perspective, in Lovecraft's story the horrors inhabit the inside of the house, whereas Hodgson had instead set up a story of siege by mysterious alien forces from outer space.
Although many have heard of the novel, perhaps few will have had the opportunity to read it in Italian, also due to a certain difficulty in finding it, at least until a few years ago. Yet, the novel is not just a viaticum (as perhaps someone intends) towards a greater understanding of that karst river from which the Lovecraftian universe derives its incessant supply. No. The house on the abyss is truly a masterpiece, it is a novel that deserves to be read and admired, as revealer of a formidable unconscious like that of Hodgson, cluttered with cosmic anxieties bordering on religious yearning, even if filtered through the glasses of the man of late positivism, who no longer seeks God, but the Principle.
The occasion of the narration is the well-known plot of the discovery of the mysterious manuscript (other topos Lovecraftian [1]). Two friends, Berregnog and Tonnison, who ventured camping in a remote area of ββwestern Ireland, whose inhabitants, for the most part, do not even speak English, but only an incomprehensible Gaelic dialect, discover a prodigious rocky outcrop, with a vaguely circular shape , overlooking a deep karst gorge, into which a stream flows with sonorous roars. On the spur looming over the abyss, the two find the remains of what had probably once been a building and, more interesting still, a rather shabby but largely legible manuscript, whose heading is, needless to say, The house on the abyss.
And so, urged by Tonnison, Berregnog begins reading what turns out to be a diary of strange events that occurred in an unknown past.Β
The events are obviously narrated in the first person by the protagonist, a man in his fifties but still vigorous (perhaps a reference to Hodgson himself), whose name is never revealed. He has been living in the "house on the abyss" for some time, with the only company of his sister Mary and the dog Pepper. The assiduous presence of the dog, in all the episodes in which the narration unfolds, is not accidental, since, as is known, the dog is, in almost all the cultures of the world, the psychopomp par excellence [2]. The abyss that opens beneath the house can only refer to the access to the world of the underworld. The catabasis, in this case, however, does not lead into the bowels of the earth, but, surprisingly, into the immeasurable interstellar spaces.
Oddities start d'emblΓ©e, for no apparent reason, on a quiet evening. The protagonist, having taken his usual place to read in his study, is lifted up by a mysterious force and carried ever higher and further away, beyond planet Earth, even beyond the known solar system, ending up landing, it is not known one's body or with one's spirit, in an unimaginable place: a wide plain enclosed by an amphitheater of mountains in the middle of which an exact replica of one's home stands out, solitary and silent. Already from this the hypothesis makes its way into the reader that, rather than being in a different part of the universe, the protagonist is in another dimension, connected to ours in a mysterious way, and whose access door seems to be the house itself (in fact, the current title, The house on the abyss is improper: the original title is The house on the borderland: lit. The house on the borderland).
But that is what hangs over the amphitheater of Monti (or thearena, as renamed by the thought of the editor) to arouse, at first, the greatest bewilderment: two terrifying giants, who turn out to be two ancient, as well as famous, pagan deities, Set and Kali: Chaos and Death, one would think. So are these the principles that govern the universe? A pessimist like Albert Caraco would not hesitate to say yes. In addition to these supreme deities, however, there are other, smaller ones, all scattered along the ravines of the mountains. Some of them seem familiar, others completely unfamiliar and repulsive:
βI turned and looked quickly up into the murky crags to my left. Below a high peak, a gray shape loomed indistinctly. I was surprised that I hadn't seen it before: then I remembered that I hadn't looked that way yet. In short, I saw her more distinctly. It was, as I said, gray. She had a huge head, but she was eyeless. That part of her face was featureless. I saw then that there were other beings up there among the peaks. Further away, half-reclining on a high ridge, I made out a livid mass, macabre and shapeless except for the filthy, half-animal face that horribly loomed halfway up her body. Then I saw others, hundreds of them. They seemed to emerge from the shadows. In many, I almost immediately recognized mythological deities; others were unknown to me, totally unknown, beyond the human possibilities of imagination. I looked everywhere and saw more, and more. The mountains teemed with fantastic beings: animal deities and monsters so hideous that, even if I had the ability to describe them, the same decency would forbid me.".
Equally shocking is the hypothesis that appears in the protagonist's mind regarding the vaunted immortality of the gods:
"There was, in them, an indefinable, dull vitality, a kind of life-in-death, something which was not life at all as we understand it, but rather an inhuman form of existence which might be likened to a state of trance: condition in which one could imagine they lasted forever. 'Immortals!'. This word came spontaneously to my mind, and I immediately began to wonder if that could be the immortality of the gods.".
The imperishable life of the gods of the cosmos (of the cosmos itself?) appears to be an impersonal metaphysical force with no apparent purpose. An unintelligent condition that drags on indefinitely through the ages. And it is one of these gods, or one of these forces, that comes forward: a grotesquely bipedal pig being, like a man-pig hybrid, suddenly appears in the arena, near the house. The being approaches it, spies on its interior: it tries to open its way in! The terrified protagonist does not have time to observe the outcome of the monster's action: the same mysterious force that had led him to that abominable place grabs him again and takes him back to planet Earth, to the small, reassuring known, illuminated solar system from the old, familiar constellations.
The gateway to "our world" is the abyss that opens under the house. It is there that, for the first time, the protagonist and the ubiquitous Pepper make indirect knowledge of pig beings. One of them, without ever being clearly seen, wounds the dog, even if not fatally. Soon the beings make their sensational entrance onto the scene. The description is detailed:
βAfter lunch, while reading in my study, I happened to look up from my book and see something peering in from the window sill, something of which only the eyes and ears protruded. So it was a pig! - I exclaimed. I stood up and saw it better: but it wasn't a pig. God only knows what he was! He reminded me, vaguely, of the hideous being I had seen on the great plain. He had a grotesquely human mouth and jaws and almost no chin. His nose jutted out into a snout, and it was this, along with his small eyes and strange ears, that gave him that fantastic pig look. His forehead was very low, and his whole face was of a hideous whiteness. For a minute, perhaps, I stood staring at the creature, with a growing feeling of nausea and dread. From his mouth came a nonstop gibberish and, once, a half-piggy grunt. But it was above all the eyes that fascinated me; at times they had flashes of horribly human intelligence, and they continually left my face to rest on some object in the room, as if my gaze disturbed them. It seemed to me that he was holding on to the windowsill with two clawed hands. Unlike his face, these hands were of a brown clay, and vaguely resembled human ones, in that they had four fingers and a thumb, joined however by a membrane up to the first joint, like those of palmipeds. They also had nails, but so long and strong that they resembled the claws of an eagle".
This is the prelude to a real siege, which lasted all night, by dozens of these repugnant beings, whose purpose is to penetrate the house in any way possible. However, the attack is thwarted, albeit with difficulty, and the rising of the sun restores an apparent calm to events.
One might wonder what pigs with rudimentary human movements represent. Is it perhaps a random phenotype, capable only of causing disgust in the reader? Hodgson's powerful imagination is able to show us monstrosities that remain well engraved in the memory of the reader; great example of this ability is found in his other great novel, raw science fiction, which is The land of eternal night, in which the theme of the death of the Sun in a distant post-apocalyptic future is developed more widely [3].
On the other hand, it could be a veiled criticism of mankind. Let's not forget that it would soon explode the Great War, in which Hodgson himself would have lost his life, incinerated by a grenade. What is certain is that they are a manifestation of the unknown forces that besiege the apparent daily tranquility from every side. How he got to write Thomas Ligotti, we live surrounded by things that threaten to turn our world into a nightmare at any moment, and only luck prevents this from happening.
However, the horrendous assault is an opportunity to explore the gorge of the abyss more carefully. The catabasis is obviously carried out in the company of the dog Pepper, a trusted escort in the underground darkness. Typical initiation theme, the descent into hell here is colored with cosmic horror: the mouth of Hades overlooks external dimensions that have nothing to do with planet Earth, even if, from circumspect exploration it is nothing more than a black abyss, into which the torrent flows with unspeakable force, what emerges into view. No trace of the pig beings. Yet it is clear that, somehow, they emerge from that hell.
The protagonist even risks his life if it weren't for Pepper. The gallery at the bottom of the well begins to fill with water due to a heavy storm and the access road is in danger of becoming blocked. Pepper promptly saves him by dragging him towards the exit and the open air just before the entrance is definitively filled by the water:
βWhen I regained consciousness, I knew that I had been in bed for two weeks. And it was another week before I felt strong enough to go out and venture to the chasm, which I found almost entirely filled by a large lake with a smooth surface. The water was disturbed only in one point in correspondence with the crevasse: where, at the end of the now submerged tunnel, the bottomless pit opened. There the water boiled continuously, and every now and then a strange bubbling rose from below. Apart from this, nothing allowed to guess what was hidden under the surface of the lake. And I thought, contemplating it, that the entrance to that hell was now sealed in such a definitive way as to make it impossible for the pig-beings to return. But this certainty was accompanied by the fear that new horrors could now come from anywhere".
One may wonder why, after all, the protagonist doesn't pack up arms and baggage and run away like hell from the terrible house over the abyss. Even the protagonist himself asks for it. The reason for staying seems to be that the house, together with the horror, also holds some of his personal memories, one of which is linked to a woman he loved in his youth and has now disappeared:
βFor many days, after the last incident which I related in my diary, I thought seriously of leaving this house; and I would certainly have left her, had not the great and marvelous event of which I intend to speak take place. Rightly my heart guided me, when I decided to stay here, despite the unknown and inexplicable visions and happenings; for if I had not stayed, I would never have seen the face of her whom I loved again. Yes, even if few know it (no one today, except my sister Mary), I have loved and, alas, I have lost my love. I could write the story of those sweet, distant days, but it would be like reopening old wounds; yet, after all that has happened, why should I care? In fact, she has come back to me, coming out of the unknown. Strangely, she warned me; she passionately warned me to avoid this house. She begged me to leave her, but she admitted when I questioned her that she could not have joined me had I been elsewhere. Yet despite this, she continued to warn me; telling me that this place was given over to evil long ago, And that cruel laws rule over it, laws that none of us here know. And Iβ¦ I just asked her, again, if she could join me somewhere else, and she couldn't help but keep silentβ.
The meeting between the two takes place on what the woman, emphatically, names Sea of ββTime, a fantastic beach shrouded in fog on which, with rhythmic beating, the waves of a milky sea break, the Sea of ββTime, in fact. Not only horror, therefore: the house is also the gateway to what is the dimension of the protagonist's heart; the presentized non-place of memories, where time ceases to exist:
βGradually, pouring out of nowhere, the mist increased as the candle flames dimmed and another light spread through the room: a white light with no visible origin. At the same time it seemed to me that the ticking of the clock in the corner accelerated; until I heard more than a continuous humming, getting louder and louder. Suddenly the buzzing ceased, the walls of the room were completely erased, and in the silence that enveloped me I began to perceive another sound: a kind of large beat, a vast pulsation, a slow rhythmic crash, which gradually became more spaced and distinct . Then, behold, I stood on the shore of an immense misty sea, and what I heard was the slow breaking of its waves at my feet. On my sides a beach of very fine, impalpable sand extended as far as the eye could see like the ocean in front of me. And under the surface of that ocean, from time to time, I seemed to see flashes, flashes: but so rapid that it was impossible to fix them in my memory and be sure that I had really seen them. Behind me rose craggy black peaks to an immeasurable height. The sky had a uniform gray color, and that place was illuminated by an immense globe of pale fire.".
But the paradise of memories can only be reached for a few moments. The vision dissolves like a dream and the woman once again disappears.
And here, after the interlude of sentimental dreaminess, probably the most surprising and visionary part of the novel: the description of the death of the solar system. This time, therefore, it is not the mind's turn to visit extracosmic dimensions; this time it is the human being himself who participates in what will inevitably occur. The acceleration of time starts slowly, and is made visible by the acceleration of the motion of the stars, as well as the hands of the clock:
βI was a little amazed, hesitated for a moment, then got up and crossed the room to lift the blind. Among the branches of the trees I saw that the sun was rising, but not slowly as usual, but with a fast, constant, perceptible motion and in the space of a minute, it reached the tops of the plants, and surpassed them: it was full day. As I watched the phenomenon in astonishment, I heard a strange buzz behind me, vibrating like the flutter of a mosquito's wings. I turned around and realized it was coming from the wall clock. Mute with amazement, I observed the dial, on which the long minute hand rotated, crossing the space between one hour and the hour in one minute, with the speed of a normal second hand. Then I saw the shadow of the window pane move across the floor towards me and a vast gleam of sunshine erase it in a moment. I turned back to the window. The sun moved visibly across the sky: climbing, climbing. It reached its zenith and passed over the house like a sailboat driven by the mistral. The porch darkened. More and more amazed, I observed another extraordinary phenomenon: the cirrus clouds, although they seemed driven by a very fast wind, did not pass through the sky, but changed shape and position from minute to minute, rapid overlapping, merging, absorbing and repelling each other, tangling and thinning out, like the backs of crazed sheep. The sun paled in the west in a brief dip in tension. From the east, the shadow of everything evident glided, with an evident, furtive, meandering, rampant motion, towards the looming greyness. The light all around became unreal. It was dark in the room. The sun disappeared over the horizon so rapidly that my vision almost received a sharp jolt. I saw, through the growing evening haze, the silvery rise of the moon, towards the South".
Time begins to flow in an ever more dizzying way: the minutes, then the seconds, correspond first to years and then to centuries and millennia. Ruin and death gradually take the place of life: Pepper finds himself reduced to a pile of dust, as well as the furniture in the house and the house itself, ruined by the weight of the accumulating centuries. A dull background noise rises to cover everything: the man realizes that it is none other than the roller of the planet's rotation! The landscape becomes increasingly desolate and dark: the garden outside the house changes into an irregular expanse of sand dunes: the strength of the sun decreases more and more:
"Very slowly, in the swirling and stealthy passage of eons towards eternity, the Earth sank into an absurd incandescent darkness, and this was only evident for a murky shade of that black which seemed to have the soul of fire. Then, suddenly, or so it seemed to me, something changed: the dark incandescent curtain hanging above my head began to flow southward, to thin out, to vibrate like the string of an Aeolian harp, and the sun suddenly burst into the sky , in all its brilliance, traversing it in a glorious parable from end to end. The succession of his movements was now visible, although still as rapid as the beat of a pulse and, as time passed - as the seconds passed - that radiance faded, took on dull tones of violet, gray, then black. Below, the world was dark, it no longer seemed composed of matter, but the ectoplasm of a fading body".
One cannot hide a certain sense of depression, of a lump in the throat reading of the imminent end of the cosmos. While until recently the distinction between night and day had become imperceptible, now the going out of the Sun and the slowing down of the Earth's rotation make the two periods manifest again:
βThe years quickly disappeared into the past, but now they were again divided into days and nights. Slowly the sun took on an incandescent golden-bronze color, surrounded by long blood-red streaks surrounded by black tongues, as in a colorful halo, distinguished by rings of various sizes. I couldn't tell if it was a new phenomenon or an optical illusion. Finally I understood: the cooling had begun in the peripheral areas of the radiation halo, which now appeared black, while those closest to the heat source were still blood red... An agonizing, squalid, desolate silence reigned over everything: the immutable, fearful stillness of a dying world."
It is probably the description of the Sun that gradually goes out that leaves a sense of greater desolation in the reader's soul: compared to this, even the alien horrors of the monstrous pigs take a back seat. The death of the cosmos is perhaps too cumbersome a thought not only for the brain but also for the heart. How can it be tolerated? But Hodgson must place it before his eyes, because his intent, like the great alchemists of the past, is the description of the Whole. No analysis of epiphenomena: here we go straight to the point, to the necessary results.
He embraces and makes us embrace space-time with the mind: no relevance is given to the details: where the mind can go further into the darkness of the principle of causality, it must precisely arrive there. All-encompassing, and therefore secretly religious, traditional vision, albeit in the guise of novel-like literary science fiction. On the other hand, the beginning of the XNUMXth century is the one in which the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics see the light. The increasingly in-depth exploration of matter cannot leave the artist-seer indifferent, who seeks with the means at his disposal to exorcise the abyss of the unknown opened wide by new scientific discoveries.
And finally, at the culmination of the reading, with an exhausted and sad soul, here we find ourselves in front of the Sun exhaling its last breath:
βThe cold became terrible, inhuman. Silence, anguished, hostile. The motion of the Earth continued to slow down steadily, inescapably. Then the end suddenly came, after a very long night, which seemed eternal to me: and I was so tired, frightened by the dark, that I welcomed the dying sun as a friend. It stood motionless in the prevailing darkness, consuming his last light, feeding on itself in his terrible agony. At the last, he made a singular backward movement and was engraved, without relief, on the limitless black shield of the sky. The center of him darkened, the last of the light gathered at the edges, then became a thin line at the equator. Finally, that too disappeared. All that remained was an immense dead, worn disc, surrounded by a slight bronze halo tinged with vermilion, misty and light as a last sigh.".
The Earth remains enveloped in a perpetual starless night; the Earth itself plunges into death, together with the Sun: only a vague misty light towards the north remains to scratch the invincible darkness:
βNo one could imagine the darkness that reigned around me. A palpable darkness, brutal and horrible; as if it were a dead body, pressed against meβ¦ a soft darkness, and cold as iceβ.
The house is now a pile of rubble, the funereal silence is broken only by the fall of rubble. This is the last perceptible "clock" of the continuous alternation of the ages, which finally culminate with the death of the entire solar system: the planets, one by one, begin to fall on the extinguished Sun, disintegrating in gloomy instantaneous flashes.
More surprising still: the Earth seems to somehow move towards a new source of light, first of the size of Jupiter, then gradually more vast. Soon, the protagnosticus finds himself in the presence of a huge green star, a veritable new Sun, which irradiates the carcass of the house and the surrounding frozen desert with its strange light. A wonderful idea flashes to man: that that star is none other than the vast Central Sun around which our universe revolves?
This idea, which might seem like a simple figment of Hodgson's fervent imagination, has instead a probable Pythagorean origin. In the philosophical system of Philolaus, the cosmos (including the Sun), revolves around a Ξ²ΟΞΌΟΟ, a "central fire" (lit. "altar") which enlivens it, imparting circular motion to it [4]. It is not impossible that Hodgson, frequenter of theosophical circles, had come across this very ancient idea.
At any rate, the bleak picture of the death of the solar system is not a curtain down, but a curtain rising. The last vision of the protagonist, direct great-grandson of that of Gordon Pym, at the point where Poe's novel ends (or rather breaks off?), leads us to the confines of metaphysics. Chapter 21 has an eloquent title: The celestial globes. From the green star, spheres of a luminous translucent begin to emerge. In some of them you can see indistinct faces. It is undoubtedly the most indecipherable part of the novel. What are those spheres? Maybe a version of Platonic ideas? The fact that we are no longer in the presence of simple matter is however clarified:
βAnd meanwhile I understood that I had entered a great new mystery, that I had entered a region never before imaginedβ¦ a subtle, intangible place, or perhaps a new form of existenceβ¦ Was the Green Star inhabited by a great Intelligence? It was a shocking idea. Was I in front of the seat of the Eternal?β¦ And Paradise? Was it an illusion? The Sea of ββTimeβ¦ and my beloved! Perhaps Heaven was what I had encounteredβ¦β.
The hypothesis that the extra-cosmic and extra-temporal journey was nothing more than an inner journey towards enlightenment begins to make its way into the reader's mind (moksha in the Hindu tradition). Isn't that the cardinal Gnostic idea? Cosmic prison is transcended only through introversion into oneself. Just by visiting entrails earth it is possible to go back to the light of the ineffable.
The vision ends in the familiar tranquility of the small study in the house over the abyss. The innumerable ages and then eternity have dissolved before the eyes of the protagonist, who finds himself in his favorite armchair, as if nothing had happened. Only one detail has remained the same: Pepper reduced to a pile of ashes [5]. The last barrier of salvation collapses. The new dog is in no way able to save him from the imminent end: the monster pigs, having returned to the attack, attack the animal in his kennel outside the garden, inflicting a purulent wound which leads to his death. All the cares of man and Mary are worthless. Until shortly thereafter, while he finds himself writing in his study (and they are the last pages of the diary, what he is writing), he feels that something monstrous enters the basement of the house, where there is the trap door that opens onto the abyss. He hears the trapdoor lift, a sound first of footsteps, then of a handle being turned.
Thus ends the reading of the manuscript, with Berregnog and Tonnison understandably dumbfounded. βWas he crazy?β is what they wonder. The searches carried out the next day are not very fruitful. The only thing that can be known from the older inhabitants of the village is that, from one day to the next, the sinister house had disappeared into thin air. No trace of its occupants either:
βThat was all we could learn about the house over the deep. As for the author of the manuscript, probably no research will ever be able to tell us who he was and where he came from. That same evening we left Ardrahan by train, where I never returned. But often, in my memory, I see the dark chasm reopened surrounded by that ruined garden, from that wild countryside; I hear the roar of falling water; and that uproar merges into the memory, or into the dream, with other and more sinister gurgles, while an eternal swirl of vapor hovers over everythingβ.
Thus, with a dismissal that is already Lovecraftian, it ends The house on the abyss. In the course of this article we have long wondered about its symbology; yet, the feeling is that, as for Berregnog and Tonnison, there are many unresolved, and probably unsolvable, questions.Β What remains in the player, tossed through the abyss of time and space, visiting unimaginable horrors with the mind, is a sense of profound mystery. Did Hodgson tell us about things that he himself saw, maybe in a dream, or is it just horror fiction? Was it his intention with this novel to tell us something else, as if it were a gloomy allegory of his idea of ββthe cosmos, or is it, after all, just entertainment?
Our opinion is that it is both. It is a work of entertainment, and at the same time a philosophical work, at the culmination of that long road, starting from the romantic era, which had finally led man to the threshold of the abyss of despair, to Nietzscheian death of God. Anyone who has read the novel cannot help but (and the writer has experienced it) recalling the great misty arena of the other dimension, the one that is like the negative of positive reality, with the specular house at its centre; the one over which the gigantic figures of Kali and Set, of Death and Chaos, loom, stupefied by their own dull eternity.
Note:
[1] Undoubtedly, the father of the reason for the mysterious and terrible book, as the engine of the narrative, is Robert William Chambers (1865 - 1933), with his cycle of The King in Yellow. In this series of short stories, the protagonists stumble against their will The King in Yellow, a strange play, subjected to the strictest censorship by the authorities, which seems capable of driving its readers mad. The work is mentioned only in fragments, yet, by now everyone knows, as if they had seen them (this is also thanks to the successful first series of T), the utopian places and the disturbing characters of the phantom work.
βI read it and re-read it, and cried and laughed and shivered in the grip of a horror that sometimes still assails me today. And that's what troubles me, because I can't forget Carcosa, where black stars soar in the skies; where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns descend into the Lake of Hali; and my mind will forever keep the memory of the Pale Mask. I pray to God that he curses the author, just as the author cursed the world with his beautiful and awful creation; terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truthβ¦ a world that now trembled before the King in Yellowβ (RW Chambers, The Reputation Repairer).
[2] Think of Cerberus or Xolotl. In Zoroastrianism the dead were always placed in the presence of a dog. There is a cosmological reason for this universalism, as Sirius, placed on the horizon line, seems to guard the access to the realm of the dead, located in the southern hemisphere. According to Plutarch, the Egyptians called the entire horizon line Anubis.
[3] Ne The land of eternal night, the Sun, our primary source of life, has gone out. The advent of perpetual night brings with it the appearance of monstrous entities, which take possession of the earth's surface, besieging the last shreds of humanity, perched in a few scattered fortresses and supported by the telluric current, a form of energy obtained from the bowels of the earth. The appearance of the monsters is the most varied. It varies from the Yellow Things, amorphous and covered with quills, to the terrifying Dogs of the Night; from the Man-Beast hybrids, to the Silent Ones, huge figures wrapped in shrouds, silent and menacing. Outside the rare impregnable fortresses, danger and death reign. The greatest danger seems to come from the terrible House of Silence, a building perhaps once human, which has survived the passing of the ages, and from which unspeakable horrors now emerge. Powerfully evocative novel, in some ways even more de The house on the abyss, The land of eternal night oppresses the reader with a constant feeling of transience and the end. It is already known that the last human beings cannot survive much longer, as the telluric current is running out. Evil is preparing to spread its funeral pall over the world. Still, Hodgson has no qualms about giving us a happy ending. All this horror is just a background, against which the love story between the protagonist and Naani is intertwined, a girl he saved thanks to a telepathic call that she sends him from a remote fortress left without telluric current. The bond between the two is not accidental, but was established centuries ago: the two already loved each other in a previous life; fact known to them through dreams. The two young men discover that they are the reincarnations of two lovers from a past time, who miraculously find themselves in that degraded future. The love affair somewhat clashes with the intolerable horror that surrounds it, but so be it. The novel closes with a silly: βTo possess Love is to possess everything, because true LOVE generates Honor and Loyalty, and all three together build the Abode of Joyβ. Needless to say what Lovecraft thought about it, despite being a great admirer of the novel.Β
[4] See in the author's work on archaic cosmology: A. Casella, At the roots of the cosmic tree, Lulu, 2018, p. 187, note 357.
[5] That Pepper was a dog with something supernatural is testified by the fact that, unlike what happens to the second dog that the protagonist takes with him, the wound inflicted on him by the monster pigs does not kill him, but, on the contrary, prodigiously heals. Sure, in the end the monsters, through the boundless acceleration of time, manage to get rid of them, but only in this not at all ordinary way.
Bibliography:
- WH Hodgson, La house on the abyss, Newton Compton Publishers, first ed. ebooks, 2012
I read it centuries ago, but honestly I didn't like it at all, despite recognizing its capital importance. Several steps even made me smile.