Currently reading The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson. Amazing!
By ShadowSwan8
I think everyone who’s looked into this book has probably been warned that the language is kind of ancient and clunky, maybe even “broken,” and that it’s written like a stream of thoughts with some repeating stuff. Honestly though, I haven’t found it that hard to follow. I did see that people sell edited or cut-down versions, and that feels kind of pointless to me—if you’re gonna read it, you might as well just get the whole thing. I’m reading the Nightshade Books edition. So far I’m really enjoying it, even if I’m not super far in. It kicks off with a frame story that’s sort of a silly love setup, but then the woman dies. After that, the guy’s soul gets thrown millions of years forward, after the sun is gone and most humans are stuck in this huge metal pyramid they call the Last Redoubt. Outside the pyramid it’s just endless dark and monsters everywhere. The reincarnated main guy is one of the few with psychic power, and he can basically feel/hear vibrations that match his lost lover’s voice. I haven’t gotten to the part where he goes looking for her yet, but I guess he’s got some spinning-disc weapon. Also the Last Redoubt runs on geomantic energy, and that ties into the weird “communing” thing he does for his psychic ability. I can’t help wondering if this is the kind of book that helped Lovecraft with his cosmic horror vibe—like, both of them seem to mess with monsters that exist in that in-between space, stretched across massive spans of time. The stuff about the pyramid’s history is wild, too, like how the Builders go inside and it turns into this whole Second History, and then later all those terrible outer races keep attacking until they set up an electric circle and seal the bottom half-mile, leading to this long “quiet watching” until the Earth-Current runs out.