The Night Land, abridged edition

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.Series Foreword vii
Introduction: Horror So Wondrous xiii
Erik Davis

I The Last Redoubt 1
II The Quiet Calling 21
III The Hushing of the Voice 43
IV Into the Night Land 81
V The Way That I Did Go 99
VI The Night Land 115
VII Down the Mighty Slope 189
VIII The Dark Pyramid 213
IX The Maid of the Olden Days 273
X The Homeward Way 311"An absolutely bonkers masterpiece . . . If Samuel Beckett tripped hard on ayahuasca, he might have come up with something like Hodgson's genre-defying novel. . . . A book I know I’ll read again and revisit in reveries for the rest of my life."
—Weird Studies

"[An] extravagantly baroque vision."
—Washington Post“For all its flaws and idiosyncrasies, The Night Land is utterly unsurpassed, unique, astounding. A mutant vision like nothing else there has ever been.”
—China Miéville

“The author’s descriptions of the outer darkness of the eternal night and the horrors abounding therein produce a weird and fantastic impression.”
—The Athenaeum (1912)

“The most touching, exquisite spirit romance that has ever been written.”
—The Bookman (1912)Erik Davis is the author of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies, Nomad Codes, and the cult classic Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information. Davis currently teaches at Pacifica Graduate Institute. He writes the Substack publication Burning Shore and has completed a history of LSD blotter art for the MIT Press.