Boring horror quest with creepy marital advice
The Night Land opens in the “present day,” at least as far as the narrator is concerned, but to us the world depicted seems rather medieval, like something from a William Morris novel or a pre-Raphaelite painting. The narrator writes in a sort of antiquated Yoda-speak, in which every sentence begins with “And,” or, on rare occasions, “Then.” The unnamed hero falls in love with his neighbor, Lady Mirdath the Beautiful. They marry, but she soon dies in childbirth. That all happens in chapter one. In chapter two, the narrator is inexplicably transmigrated to a world millions of years in the future. The sun has died, leaving the Earth in perpetual night, but heat and some light are provided by geothermal energies. This dark world is filled with monsters and evil. The surviving humans have retreated to a giant pyramid, miles wide and tall, containing over a thousand cities. The narrator begins receiving telepathic messages from a woman named Naani, who lives in another stronghold of human holdouts in a distant unknown location. He suspects that this Naani may actually be his deceased love Mirdath, so he sets out alone upon the Night Lands to find her.
The Night Land is slightly better than The House on the Borderland, simply because House was a messy assemblage of spooky imagery with no rhyme or reason to it, while the happenings in The Night Land actually obey a fictional logic. But boy, is this book boring! While Hodgson seems to have put a lot of thought into the creation of this world, it reads as if no forethought whatsoever was put into the story that takes place there. Random events just happen without building upon each other, and the text is unforgivably repetitive. The narrator wanders through the land, eats, and sleeps. Occasionally he sees a monster, which he either avoids or fights. Certain phrases are repeated over and over again, to the point where you’ve gotta wonder if it’s intended to be a joke: “I ate two of the capsules and drank some of the water.” “I saw x number of fire pits,” and “I lie down and rest among the moss bushes.” While reading The Night Land, you could space out for a half an hour and not miss anything, because each chapter is pretty much the same as the one before. There’s only chapter towards the end that could be called exciting.
And then there’s the love story . . . ugh. A large portion of the book is basically a marriage manual for troglodytes: If you’re woman is “naughty” and doesn’t know who’s boss, flog her. Because the novel was published before World War I, popular morals wouldn’t have allowed the hero and his female companion to have sex (because there’s no marriage in the wildernesses of the Night Land). Nevertheless, there are all kinds of clumsy, gooey love scenes in which Hodgson hints at his own propensity towards foot fetishism and S&M fantasies. Such intimate moments are not only creepy but also boring, because they’re just as repetitive as the rest of the book. H. P. Lovecraft greatly admired this novel, but then again, H. P. Lovecraft died in 1937. Given all the talk of wife-whipping, I’m not sure how one can justify admiring this novel in the 21st century.
Fool me once, Hodgson, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I gave him a second chance after The House on the Borderland, but The Night Land really wasn’t much better. This might appeal somewhat to the Dungeons & Dragons crowd, but I would imagine most avid readers of sci-fi, fantasy, or horror would find this book to be a rather dull and clumsy foray into those genres.
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