The last quarter of the book drags woefully, but fails to spoil the tremendous power of the whole.And really, he's right. Midway in the book the central figure ventures outside the pyramid on a quest through death-haunted realms untrod by man for millions of years - and in his slow, minutely described, day-by-day progress over unthinkable leagues of immemorial blackness there is a sense of cosmic alienage, breathless mystery, and terrified expectancy unrivalled in the whole range of literature.

The picture of a night-black, dead planet, with the remains of the human race concentrated in a stupendously vast metal pyramid and besieged by monstrous, hybrid, and altogether unknown forces of the darkness, is something that no reader can ever forget: Shapes and entities of an altogether non-human and inconceivable sort - the prowlers of the black, man-forsaken, and unexplored world outside the pyramid - are suggested and partly described with ineffable potency while the night-land landscape with its chasms and slopes and dying volcanism takes on an almost sentient terror beneath the author's touch. 'Allowing for all its faults, it is yet one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written. Lovecraft in the following fashion: 'It is told in a rather clumsy fashion, as the dreams of a man in the seventeenth century, whose mind merges with its own future incarnation and is seriously marred by painful verboseness, repetitiousness, artificial and nauseously sticky romantic sentimentality, and an attempt at archaic language even more grotesque and absurd than that in Glen Carrig. The monsters surround the pyramid in a perpetual siege lasting for eons, waiting for the moment when its defenses must fail.īut one man, born out of his time, must leave the pyramid to seek his long-lost love though all the perils of the Night Land. Over the ages, monsters and evil forces have descended to the earth, compelling the surviving humans to take refuge in a great pyramid of imperishable metal built in a miles-deep chasm.

The story opens in the 19th century, but quickly moves to the far future, where the sun has gone out, leaving the world in a darkness broken only by strange lights and mysterious fires. As a labor of love, James Stoddard has rewritten Hodgson's book to bring it to a wider audience. Penned in 1912, The Night Land is considered by many to be a work of genius, but one written in a difficult, archaic style that readers often find impenetrable. An adventure of both science fiction and fantasy-one of the great love stories-this is William Hope Hodgson's masterpiece, rewritten for the modern reader.

The night land