![]() ![]() ![]() The Night Land stands in the distant past of the genre like the Watching Thing in its own pages: grotesque, immense, unmoving, a brooding presence watching a tortured landscape. (by a lot) and probably more sexist Conan and Jirel of Joiry both fought the offspring of the Night Land’s monsters Gene Wolfe and Jack Vance both wrote their own night lands in response. Tolkien and Lovecraft and early sword and sorcery pulp writers all borrowed a great deal of imagery and mood from it Minas Morgul is the House of Silence rebuilt, and the volcanic and ashen desolation of Mordor owes much to the magma-lit and poisoned emptiness of the Night Land, and the chill dread of the Ringwraiths to Hodgson’s silent Shrouded Ones Lovecraft’s more abstract horrors are the love-children of Hodgson’s pneumavores and the alien gods of late nineteenth-century horror, and the mood of cosmic, existential horror is something he gets directly from Hodgson, who was less racist than H.P. That novel, published in 1912, was incredibly formative for me, and I have never read another book that rivals it for extravagance and scope of imagination in that respect, it dwarfs later science fiction and fantasy. This week’s read for me is The Night Land, which I last read ten years ago, and previously, ten years before that. ![]()
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