THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND by William Hope Hodgson

Classic Haunted House Novel in the Lovecraft Tradition!

More terrifying than Steven King, more unsettling than Peter Straub! The House on the Borderland is the ultimate haunted house story. Horror grandmaster H. P. Lovecraft hailed it as "something unique in literature ... everywhere there is manifest the author's power to suggest vague, ambushed horrors in natural scenery ... a classic of the first water." Editor/Writer/publisher Donald A. Wollheim called it "a classic no one who enjoys imaginative literature should ignore."

The House on the Borderland's atmosphere of ineluctable skin-crawling suspense, created by William Hope Hodgson in his too-short career as an author of supernatural horror, is unparalleled. On a fishing trip in a desolate part of Ireland, the narrator and his friend come upon a ruinous and deserted house set in an unmapped wilderness of forest and stone. Neither speaks the local language, and so are unwarned about the sinister house—or rather, what is left of a house, on the edge of an apparently bottomless chasm.

With foreboding, they try to ignore the isolation and unsettling noises from the pit and the surrounding wood. They explore the ruins, and discover there a moldering book, which portrays—but doesn't explain—the unseen life of the brooding house and the ultimate fate of its vanished inhabitants. Hodgson's mastery of mood setting, coupled with his ability to transform an ordinary fishing trip into a journey through the abysses of time, space and Utter Darkness, place The House on the Borderland in a category of its own in the literature of horror.