“Waked, and unquiet”: William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land

Alder, Emily

Abstract

William Hope Hodgson (1877-1917) is a central but sometimes overlooked figure in the development of weird fiction in the early twentieth century. Hodgson’s work flourished at the intersection of what we now call science fiction, Gothic, fantasy, and horror, and The Night Land is the most remarkable of his novels, propelling readers into a distant future for six hundred pages of romance and adventure in the world after the death of the sun. Horrors from unseen dimensions, monstrous creatures, and newly-evolving species populate a darkened earth surrounding the towering Great Redoubt, a metal pyramid in which the remnants of humanity shelter, themselves evolved physically and psychically beyond their twentieth-century ancestors. The fragility of human physical and spiritual existence in The Night Land is acute, heightening the stakes for the lovers at the centre of the story within an epic spatial and temporal setting.

Citation

Alder, E. (in press). “Waked, and unquiet”: William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land. In The Weird: A Companion. Peter Lang

• Acceptance Date: Jan 17, 2023
• Deposit Date: Feb 3, 2023
• Book Title: The Weird: A Companion