Review: The House on the Borderland

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The House on the Borderland was first published in 1908. This is my entry for the Novella category in the Back to the Classics challenge. According to GoodReads it is 156 pages, under the 250 page limit for the category. It is also my second book for the Readers Imbibing Peril challenge (http://readersimbibingperil.com). I listened to it as an audiobook from LibriVox.

Synopsis: Two guys visiting Ireland find a manuscript in the ruins of an old house. It is a diary from the last inhabitant of the house, an old man who had lived in the house with his sister and his dog. Most of the story is the contents of the diary.

I read, and, in reading, lifted the Curtains of the Impossible that blind the mind, and looked out into the unknown.

What I liked:
* The descriptions! This book is definitely more about establishing a mood than about character or plot.
* The sense of mystery. The house is a "house on the borderland", a portal to other dimensions. The house is besieged by swine-like monsters, and after that it gets weird. A substantial chunk of the book describes a journey over vast distances of time and space.

Another vast space went by, and the whole enormous flame had sunk to a deep, copper color. Gradually, it darkened, from copper to copper-red, and from this, at times, to a deep, heavy, purplish tint, with, in it, a strange loom of blood.