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Mir's Reviews > The House on the Borderland
The House on the Borderland
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Well, that was odd.
I'm using odd as a fairly neutral term, here. This story was bizarre, but not in a way that was thought-provoking or funny. AS a whole the story never really went anywhere. (Seriously, why even include a lost Love if she only gets a couple paragraphs?) It had mildly interesting bits, and the swine-things were creepy. The cosmic descriptions were too long and got boring, but otherwise, it was okay, I guess.
The strange, isolated house, the mysterious crevice, and the atmosphere of dread and suspense surrounding them were the strongest part.
I read this because it was a major influence on Lovecraft and some other fantasy authors I like, so in that sense I'm glad to check it off my to-read list. I've also read a couple of Hodgson's Carnacki stories and they were a bit better although still on my "waste of a good concept" list. What's up with early horror writers narrating everything post facto so there's no suspense?
I'm using odd as a fairly neutral term, here. This story was bizarre, but not in a way that was thought-provoking or funny. AS a whole the story never really went anywhere. (Seriously, why even include a lost Love if she only gets a couple paragraphs?) It had mildly interesting bits, and the swine-things were creepy. The cosmic descriptions were too long and got boring, but otherwise, it was okay, I guess.
The strange, isolated house, the mysterious crevice, and the atmosphere of dread and suspense surrounding them were the strongest part.
I read this because it was a major influence on Lovecraft and some other fantasy authors I like, so in that sense I'm glad to check it off my to-read list. I've also read a couple of Hodgson's Carnacki stories and they were a bit better although still on my "waste of a good concept" list. What's up with early horror writers narrating everything post facto so there's no suspense?
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March 13, 2019
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March 13, 2019
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But that wasn't a hard and fast rule -- plenty of authors at this time used first person past tense in the same way we usually use it now. Algernon Blackwood, for instance. Hodgson does it himself in the main section of Borderland, only framing it as a journal. There's not obvious (to me) reason why Carnacki needs his fictional friend-audience. Although I suppose it's kind a moot point since once you have established that it's a series with one lead character they're obviously going to survive. Really the suspense in Carnacki is whether or not there will be something supernatural. Seems to be 50/50.
Isn't the narration unavoidable? They had to write first-person stories, because an omniscient narrator couldn't narrate something that was obviously untrue (as genre stories were). But they had to be written in the past tense, because the present tense makes no logical sense if you still see a story as something told to you by a storyteller (otherwise you'd have to be standing next to the protagonist/narrator while the story was happening!). Plus, there needs to be some sort of framing story to explain why the narrator is insane, because otherwise we might think the reader was...
I think it took quite a while before genre was fully accepted as legitimate, and quite a while before wilder and more illogical narrative viewpoints were widely accepted.
[Plus, of couse, writers like Hodgson were responding to a canon of classic genre stories from the 19th century, and tended to begin by adopting their conventions]