A Masterpiece of sorts
"W H. Hodgson's The Night Land would have made it in eminence from the unforgettable somber splendor of the images it presents, if it were not disfigured by a sentimental and irrelevant erotic interest and fry a foolish and flat archaism of style." — C. S. Lewis
"The supreme master of imaginative horror in science fiction was William Hope Hodgson and his tour de force was the apocalyptic novel The Night Land..." — Sam Moskowitz
"…an achievement without equal... a masterpiece of sorts." — Brian Stableford
THE NIGHT LAND IS William Hope Hodgson's towering achievement. Awe inspiringly massive, convoluted and purposefully archaic, it is his most ambitious and influential work... a "tour de force." Numerous writers have taken up the gauntlet thrown down by Hodgson, and engage in similar thematic endeavors, many of which far surpass Hodgson's flawed masterpiece.
The Night Land was published in 1912 by Eveleigh Nash. This was Hodgson's first book from Eveleigh Nash, and was not particularly successful, from a commercial standpoint. It is telling that while Hodgson had four more books issued by this publisher, they were all collections, and two of them collected popular serial characters.
Some Hodgson scholars (notably Sam Gafford in his essay "Writing Backwards: The Novels of William Hope Hodgson") have suggested that The Night Land was the first novel written by Hodgson — that his novels were written in the opposite order in which they were published. This idea is an intriguing one, and Gafford cites certain letters written by Hodgson in 1905 which support this idea. Regardless of the order of composition, what is clear is that subsequent to the publication of The Night Land, increasingly commercial short fiction made up the bulk of Hodgson's output.
The subtitle of The Night Land — "A Love Tale" provides the thematic glue that binds this fourth volume of his collected fiction together — Hodgson's most un-commercial "romance" is presented here with his overtly romantic "woman's" fiction. If C. S. Lewis had a problem with the "sentimental and irrelevant erotic interest" in The Night Land, he would be horrified by the stories contained in this volume, or at the very least, consigned them to the bins of crass commercial fiction from which they sprang.
Nash's Magazine, The Grand Magazine, Red Magazine, and Blue Magazine all provided outlets for Hodgson's romantic work, with "The Captain of the Onion Boat" being published prior to The Night Land, in 1910. In addition to its presence in Hodgson's collection Men of Deep Waters, "The Captain of the Onion Boat" was published in the U.S. in pamphlet form in 1911.
"The Smugglers" and "The Wailing Gully" are a bit more plot driven then the others in this volume, but they are, at their heart, tales of romance. Grand Magazine provided the commercial outlet for these stories in March and September of 1911, respectively (again, prior to The Night Land publication).
"The Girl with the Grey Eyes" and "Kind, Kind and Gentle is
She" were published in Red Magazine in January and April of 1913, while "Timely Escape" wasn't published until after Hodgson's death in Blue Magazine in 1922.
Critics like Lewis single out the sentiment of The Night Land as the source of its failure. Others suggest it is the falsely archaic style, which is even more overwrought and distracting than that the affected style of The Boats of the Glen Carrig. Still others point to its ponderous length. Despite all these flaws, and perhaps because of them, the novel does succeed. The unnatural tone, the epic length, and Hodgson's sentimentality all work together in a surprising way.
The romantic fiction in this volume (along with other sentimental stories such as "The Valley of Lost Children", and "The Sea Horses" to be presented in Volume five), as well as Hodgson's relationship to his wife, all provide insight into a man who, despite the cosmic alienation for which he is most remembered, had a profoundly sentimental side which often manifested itself in his fiction. This duality then becomes the defining contradiction of his novel, The Night Land... "A Masterpiece of sorts..."
The Dreams that are only Dreams
"This to be Love, that your spirit to live in a natural holiness with the Beloved, and your bodies to be a sweet and natural delight that shall be never lost of a lovely mystery. . . . And shame to be unborn, and all things to go wholesome and proper, out of an utter greatness of understanding; and the Man to be an Hero and a Child before the Woman; and the Woman to be an Holy Light of the Spirit and an Utter Companion and in the same time a glad Possession unto the Man. . . . And this doth be Human Love. . . ."
". . . for this to be the especial glory of Love, that it doth make unto all Sweetness and Greatness, and doth be a fire burning all Littleness; so that did all in this world to have met The Beloved, then did Wantonness be dead, and there to grow Gladness and Charity, dancing in the years."