The House on the Borderland

About the book

Travellers discover a damaged manuscript associated with a remote and ruined house. The account it contains describes a recluse's experiences in a dwelling whose boundaries seem unable to keep out either physical threat or more expansive visions. Hodgson moves between immediate, practical fear and scenes that strain the narrator's understanding of time, matter, and the universe. The found-document frame keeps readers aware that the testimony reaches them incompletely, without an authority capable of settling its meaning. Familiar acts of watching, guarding, and recording become fragile responses to events of impossible scale. The novel's distinctive atmosphere comes from this movement between enclosure and immensity: a single home appears at once intensely vulnerable and connected to regions far beyond its occupant's capacity to comprehend.

• Isolation
• Cosmic uncertainty
• Testimony

Why read it

For the unsettling shift from a besieged domestic space to visions of almost unimaginable scale.

English text