The house on the border

The house on the border (English original title: The House on the Borderland ) is a 1908 novel by William Hope Hodgson from the genre Fantastic Literature . It is the most famous work by the English writer who died in 1918.

In the framework story, two anglers come across a ruin in the far west of Ireland . You discover a manuscript in which the last inhabitant of the remote house describes his eerie experiences:

The protagonist of the story, looking for loneliness, moves into an ancient stone house far from any human settlement. Shortly after his arrival, there were inexplicable incidents. Mysterious powers take him to an unknown planet on which an identical stone house exists on the edge of a vast plain. He watches as a huge, upright monster with the face of a pig tries to enter the building.

The narrator initially believes he has hallucinated. But then his house is attacked by pig-like creatures that seem to come from a nearby ravine with abyssal caves. The intrusion attempts are getting more intense from day to day, the situation more and more hopeless. The obvious solution would be to give up the house. Hodgson brings a romantic element to the narrative at this point. While visiting the distant planet, the protagonist meets his deceased lover several times. These encounters cause him to stay indoors and defy the attacks.

The inexplicable incidents are not resolved at the end of the novel either. The reader has plenty of room for their own interpretations. Thanks to the very detailed description of the journeys through space and time, which also describes the setting of the earth and the extinction of the sun, Das Haus on the Border can be viewed as an early science fiction novel.

expenditure

• William Hope Hodgson: The House on the Frontier and Other Fantastic Tales . Frankfurt: Insel-Verlag, 1973. ISBN 3-458-05818-4