THE READING RHEUM: THE NIGHT LAND (1912)

Over the years, as I’ve researched the evolution of fantasy-concepts in prose fiction—with special attention to their significance for either the superhero idiom or the combative mode—I’ve meant to force myself to re-read the 20,000 word monster known as William Hope Hodgson’s THE NIGHT LAND. It’s probably been thirty years since I first read it, and even then, such critics as C.S. Lewis and H.P. Lovecraft warned me in advance that many of the novel’s virtues were impaired by assorted vices. I remember agreeing with those critics in large part. On my second (and probably last) reading, I’m less impressed with the specific virtues of NIGHT LAND than with its place in fantasy-lit history.

The year of the book’s publication, 1912, boasts at least four major conceptual achievements. In America Edgar Rice Burroughs authored two of the four, debuting both Tarzan and John Carter of Mars. In the same year two English authors, Sax Rohmer and Arthur Conan Doyle, conceived respectively the first great Asian supervillain, Fu Manchu, and the first perfectly preserved prehistoric domain, the Lost World. Four years previous, William Hope Hodgson had published his best-conceived novel, THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND, and in 1912 he sought to up the ante with an even more ambitious fantasy-scape, THE NIGHT LAND.

Though there had various “fantastic voyage” tales before THE NIGHT LAND, I don’t know how many succeeded in picturing a futuristic version of Earth in apocalyptic terms. Readers of the late 20^th century grew up on numerous post-apocalyptic tales where Earth was ravaged by disaster, often nuclear holocaust, and reshaped into a bizarre new environment, but such stories were relatively rare in the early 2oth. NIGHT LAND doesn’t even sport a disaster as such. Following a lame framing-device, in which a man of relatively modern times suffers bereavement, he imagines a far-future world dominated by darkness and strange lurking monsters. Most of humankind has been eradicated, and the survivors endure in a few super-scientific cities known as “Redoubts.” In contrast to later post-apocalyptic worlds, the nameless hero’s purpose is not to redeem the fallen world, but to rescue a single woman, implicitly the reincarnation of the woman who dies during the framing-device. The modern man and the future-man are inexplicably the same person, and both of them talk in a fustian manner that reminds me of the labored language of medieval epics. It’s this literary style—coupled with a first-person narration that eschews any dialogue—that makes the monstrous NIGHT LAND so hard to enjoy.

I’ll call the unnamed narrator “X,” since Hodgson once published a cut-down version of the novel entitled THE DREAM OF X. X lives in the largest of the human enclaves, a vast pyramid known as the Last Redoubt. Implicitly futuristic technology keeps these scions of humanity alive against the external threats, though for Hodgson future-science is just a source of visual wonders and nothing more. In the course of the novel X sometimes makes veiled references to evolution, though not using that specific name, but similarly, his creator has no interest in showing how the Night Land evolved from the old world. This provides yet more common ground with the world of the medieval romance, wherein noble knights forged through assorted strange domains like nothing on Earth, scaring up witches and dragons and knights of evil intent.

X, though for the most part an ordinary man, possesses a form of telepathy, and this allows him to apprehend that another human enclave, the Lesser Redoubt, has been attacked by the Night Land’s monsters. However, at least one woman has survived: Naani, who is the reincarnation of the woman lost by the original narrator. “Five hundred youths” of the Last Redoubt storm forth to fight the monsters, and they’re all killed. So X decides to mount a lone rescue-mission, moving on foot and armed only with a weapon called a “Discos,” which can cut through monster-flesh like a buzzsaw.

Lewis and Lovecraft opined that the first half of the novel, with the warrior making his way through the Night Land, was better than the second half, in which X locates Naani and starts the arduous process of taking her back to the Last Redoubt. Granting that in both sections Hodgson’s style is archaic, prolix, and monotonous, I became a little more interested once X reached the halfway mark, and was forced thereafter to guard over a mostly helpless maiden during his exploits. (Naani does stab one of the various monsters that attack the couple on their way back, but a valkyrie she ain’t.) One point of interest is that though X does get Naani back to their refuge, the occasion is almost marked by tragedy, but Hodgson allows for a happy ending after all.

In addition to castigating the horribly affected style Hodgson attempts in the novel, Lovecraft and Lewis blast the romantic arc, with the former attacking the “sticky romantic sensibility” and the latter assailing the “irrelevant erotic interest.” Indeed, in editor Lin Carter’s introduction to Ballantine’s 1972 paperback edition of NIGHT LAND, he remarks that Ballantine’s editors cut down a lot of the billing and cooing. Even what remains in the Ballantine edition is horrendously repetitive, and Naani is no more interesting as a character than is X: both are just stereotypes of heroine and hero. The romantic arc is never compelling, but at times there’s a mild perverse interest in seeing how Hodgson depicts feminine impracticality during the long pilgrimage. The two protagonists naturally never have sex, since they’re not married, but Hodgson devotes so much space to telling us how often they kiss that a modern reader has to wonder.

Editor Lin Carter compares the Night Land to the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch, but that’s an overly ambitious claim. Hodgson conjures up a lot of weird horrors, including gigantic slugs and monstrous hounds, but the ones the reader sees clearly are fairly dull, and the creatures that are not seen clearly are a little too hazy and ill-defined. Hodgson isn’t interested in carefully building a picture of his apocalyptic world, he wants to evoke “the horrors of the half-seen.” But I think he was less interested in building his world than his hero: all the monsters exist only for X to slay them with his mighty Discos. In fact, the fight-scenes are the novel’s strength, particularly one in which X contends with a four-armed humanoid and literally “disarms” the monster by cutting off its upper set of arms with his weapon.

Thus THE NIGHT LAND qualifies as a combative work. However, the world itself is too vague to deserve the status of a literary myth. It strikes me as an uneasy blend of two such myths promulgated during the late 19^th century: the bizarre future-scape that appears in H.G. Wells’ THE TIME MACHINE, and the endless geographical vistas found in the faux-medieval fantasies of William Morris. I cannot say with any certainty if Hodgson had read either author; it’s possible the Night Land was inspired by other, comparable sources. But the combination of concepts seems fortuitous. Wells supplied the eerie image of a world mutated by the ravages of time, but the main action of the story was confined to a limited “stage,” a small part of England, in order to illustrate the cultural downfall of the Eloi and the Morlocks. Morris’s fantasies were the first purely literary works to take an Earth-like landscape and populate it with magical locales and inhabitants thereof. Hodgson, by cross-breeding the ideas of the apocalyptic world and the endless fantasy-landscape, didn’t so much create a new lit-myth as to pave the way for greater works to follow.