Paul's Reviews > The House on the Borderland

“I read, and, in reading, lifted the Curtains of the Impossible, that blind the mind, and looked out into the unknown.”
This sort of goes beyond Gothic to weird. It was published in 1908 and apparently has influenced the likes of Lovecraft and later horror writers. It is set in the west of Ireland in a remote and wild area. There is a story within a story. I might say plot within a plot, but I can’t because there isn’t a plot. It involves two fisherman on an expedition to the west of Ireland. There find the ruins of a house in a very remote spot, near a ravine and what seems to be a pit: there are overgrown gardens too. They do a bit of exploration and both feel the atmosphere to be oppressive and distinctly creepy. They find an old manuscript. Beating a hasty retreat they return to their tents and read the manuscript overnight. The manuscript takes up the bulk of the novel.
The manuscript is written by the previous owner of the house and describes his time there. There are plenty of gothic tropes, large castle like house with several floors, a creepy cellar, a trap door in the cellar with who knows what beneath, a faithful old dog. The manuscript is in the first person. There are virtually no characters in the book: the two fishermen, the narrator, an aged sister and the dog. The dog, Pepper, was pretty much the most well-rounded character.
It all happens thus and there may be a few spoilers. The narrator starts to explore his surroundings, including the pit. He also has what appears to be a hallucinatory experience. Then creatures start to appear from the pit: pig creatures (yes, it’s all unutterably silly) and they attack the house (and the dog).
‘Then all at once, something caught my vision, something that came ‘round one of the huge buttresses of the House, and so into full view. It was a gigantic thing, and moved with a curious lope, going almost upright after the manner of a man. It was quite unclothed, and had a remarkable luminous appearance. Yet it was the face that attracted and frightened me the most. It was the face of a swine.’
The second part of the manuscript consists of the narrator standing in his room whilst time passes very quickly: years, centuries and millennia and he watches it all and describes it in great detail. Lots of stuff about stars and solar systems. There is a comic version of this as well. It’s been dramatized for radio and a Doom Metal band called Electric Wizard wrote a song about it.
This was certainly a change in direction from Victorian Gothic fiction and certainly influenced later fiction and it has several modern horror tropes. Principally the “Don’t open the door” feeling in the reader. It’s all very disjointed. It’s unbelievable, but it’s meant to be. It’s also a complete mess and feels half finished. One of my least favourite forays into weird fiction.