Towards the Visionary Antipodes of the Human Psyche: Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft Anticipate the Psychedelic Experience.

           There was a strongly exciting sense that my knowledge of past (or present?) reality was enlarging pulse by pulse, but so rapidly that my intellectual processes could not keep up the pace.  The content was thus entirely lost to retrospection - it sank into the limbo into which dreams vanish as we gradually awake.  The feeling - I won't call it belief - that I had a sudden opening, had seen through a window, as it were, distant realities that incomprehensibly belonged with my own life, was so acute that I cannot shake it off today.

              William James.

             And it is precisely this which gives them their numinous quality, their power to transport the beholder out of the Old World of his everyday experience, far away, towards the visionary antipodes of the human psyche.

              Aldous Huxley, Heaven and Hell.

            So when I learned of the drug which would unlock the gate and drive me through, I resolved to take it when next I awaked.

              H.P. Lovecraft, Ex Oblivione.

"Dream of flying over a city."

              I've never really subscribed to the commonplace that H.P. Lovecraft was a bad writer redeemed by a prodigious imagination.  To me, this view feels predicated on a narrow sense of what good prose or good writing should be like.  Gene Wolfe once said that the essence of good writing lies in matching the right style, register, or "voice", to the specific type of story being told.  By this criterion, it is difficult to find fault with Lovecraft as a stylist.  His distinctive literary voice - sounding somewhere between a carnival barker luring you into a darkened tent, a gibbering madman whispering quasi-scientific delusions in your ear, and an arch spoofer who is completely in on the joke - fits the weird contours of his fictional universe like a glove.  Lovecraft as a prose writer is like Vincent Price as an actor - we find them completely believable because their camp artifice is perfectly attuned to the ambiance of the world into which it is embedded.

           A reasonable argument might be made, however, that Lovecraft's work has enjoyed a pervasive cultural resonance and influence which somehow exceeds his abilities and accomplishments as a writer - that it possesses some peculiar x-factor which elevates it above the work of other more technically skilled writers.  The most common explanation offered for this x-factor is that Lovecraft's work embodies a consistent philosophical worldview, and might be construed as offering a mythic cosmology for a materialistic, post-religious era, or, more paradoxically, a myth-cycle for an era for whom the world can no longer be organized according to myths.  According to this view, the value of Lovecraft's work lies in its imaginative articulation of what Teilhard de Chardin called the modern "malady of space-time", the "feeling of futility, of being crushed by the enormities of the cosmos." (The Phenomenon of Man.)  This certainly articulates the difference between Lovecraft and his great contemporary Clark Ashton Smith.  Smith was a better prose writer and poet than Lovecraft, but his work tended towards a purer, more lush and visual type of fantasy.  This argument doesn't seem entirely convincing, though.  Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood also expressed a philosophical worldview in their stories, and yet they have not enjoyed the enduring cultural fascination of the Providence misanthrope.  Also, if the primary value of the work lies in its articulation of a despairing, nihilistic philosophy of modern materialism, why has it proven so appealing to hardcore occultists like Kenneth Grant and Alan Moore?

             Lovecraft is one of the few iconic authors in the weird fiction/fantasy realm that I am aware of who was also, at least on the surface, an atheistic materialist.  The two things do not immediately go together.  Most really great authors of fantastic literature, I think, have a kind of Platonic attitude towards the realm of the imagination - they tend to regard the imagination as being of equivalent or even superior importance to the material realm.  This is natural enough.  You wouldn't spend your professional career underwater unless you thought there was something down there.  Most of Lovecraft's most significant influences - particularly Machen and Blackwood - were mystics who regarded their weird fictions as an expression of how they thought the world really was.  In Lovecraft, however, we find the paradox of a materialist who chose to express his cosmic philosophy for the modern scientific epoch by means of a mythopoeia of ancient gods and resurgent atavisms, and who found his ideas and images more in the manner of a shaman than a scientist.  The real x-factor in Lovecraft's work, I think, is that he was a visionary writer.  I mean visionary in this context to denote the type of artist who does not seen to create alternative realities, but rather to describe them.  Although perhaps a little difficult to nail down in concrete terms, this is a characteristic that we instantly recognize.  The ordinary or even highly accomplished artist toils to create scenarios involving things they have invented or using preexisting archetypes which have come down to them from other artists, but the visionary seems to see things which are not immediately associated with their own personalities or personal histories.  Discussing psychedelic and visionary states in his essay Heaven and Hell, Huxley expresses this sense whereby the truly visionary experience does not seem to derive from our own subjective selves and personal histories:

          "Almost never does the visionary see anything that reminds him of his own past.  He is not remembering scenes, persons or objects, and he is not inventing them; he is looking at a new creation.  The raw material for this creation is provided by the visual experiences of ordinary life; but the molding of this material into forms is the work of someone who is most certainly not the self who originally had the experiences, or who later recalled and reflected upon them.  They are (to quote the words used by Dr J. R. Smythies in a recent paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry) 'the work of a highly differentiated mental compartment, without any apparent connection, emotional or volitional, with the aims, interests, or feelings of the person concerned.'"

           One of the most intriguing qualities about Lovecraft's work is the strangely obsessive and consistent quality of his visions, which we know to be largely derived from his dreams; the obsessive reiteration, for example, of aerial visions of gigantic, antediluvian architectures.  The Call of Cthulhu famously suggests that the dreams of artists, poets, and the insane possess a peculiar consistency and sensitivity to perturbations of the cosmic ether; this faculty is notably absent in men of industry and scientists:

           "These responses from aesthetes told a disturbing tale.  From February 28th to April 2nd a large proportion of them had dreamed very bizarre things, the intensity of the dreams being immeasurably the stronger during the period of the sculptor's delirium.  Over a fourth of those who reported anything, reported scenes and half-sounds not unlike those which Wilcox had described; and some of the dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic nameless thing visible towards the last."

            Lovecraft was clearly haunted and preoccupied by the visions he experienced in dreams.  A sizable percentage of his work (the Dunsany-influenced pieces) directly concern dreams and dream-quests.  His journals and commonplace books are littered with references to dreams, and the story Celephais was occasioned by a dream which he describes thus: "Dream of flying over a city."  The first paragraph of the very peculiar prose poem Nyarlathotep was apparently written while the author had not fully awoken from the dream which inspired it. In his annotations to the Complete Fiction, S.T. Joshi also notes a very intriguing entry: "Man journeys into the past - or imaginative realm - leaving bodily shell behind."  First of all, the association of the dreaming mind, the imagination, and the deep past is a pregnant one in the light of Lovecraft's fictional obsessions, and the second half of the quote has a peculiar savor of Platonic mysticism to it, considering the author's putative materialism.  We thus find in Lovecraft a bundle of contradictions - an obsessive visionary who publicly regarded his stories as errant but entertaining nonsense; an antiquarian and anti-modernist who wrote about antediluvian terrors and horrifying atavisms; a champion of the scientific worldview whose stories constantly posit true knowledge of the universe as something the human race would be much happier (and saner) without ever acquiring.  These contradictions reflect a conflict between Lovecraft's rational faculties and the overwhelming power of his visionary dream-life, a conflict which is echoed, one suspects, in his attitude towards science and materialism.  I will leave these ideas, however, to form a backdrop to this essay, which will explore various ways in which Lovecraft and weird fiction form a precursor to the psychedelic explosion of much later postwar culture.

Opening the Door in the Wall.  

                                                                   William James

  

           Last night I swallowed the drug and floated dreamily into the golden valley and the shadowy groves; and when I came this time to the antique wall, I saw that the small gate of bronze was ajar.

            H.P. Lovecraft, Ex Oblivione.

           We tend to regard the psychedelic era as spanning roughly from the 50s (the decade during which the term was first coined) to the mid or late 70s (by which time mass experimentation with LSD and other drugs had permeated the ambiance of the larger culture through music, cinema, and design aesthetics).  Of course, ceremonial and ritual psychedelic drug-use goes back probably as long as we have been anatomically modern humans, and has remained an integral part of various isolated tribal and hunter/gatherer communities ever since.  As a large scale phenomenon of western culture, however, we find only small, isolated pockets of psychedelic or quasi-psychedelic experimentation occurring on the bohemian fringes of society prior to the 1960s.  Lets look briefly at an interesting precursor to the psychedelic revolution which took place in in the late 19th century.  At some point in the 1870s, the New York-born poet and philosopher Benjamin Paul Blood was given nitrous oxide as an anesthetic during a routine dental operation.  What followed was anything but routine; Blood had a full-blown mystical epiphany under the influence of the gas, and promptly produced a rhapsodic 37-page pamphlet called The Anesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy.  Blood's pamphlet, and the brief flurry of excitement it generated among fellow travelers, would probably be forgotten today, were it not for its influence on his friend William James.  Blood turned the great Harvard psychologist and philosopher on to nitrous oxide, and he had similarly profound experiences under its influence.  In fact, one suspects that James' anesthetic revelation formed the chief undercurrent of his imperishable classic The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).  It was in this work, while discussing his experiences with nitrous oxide, that James set the whole tone for the much later psychedelic era in an iconic, oft-quoted passage:

            "Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print.  One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken.  It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special kind of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.  We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation.  No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded."

           The implications of this assertion remain radical to this day.  It has become a commonplace that the advance of scientific knowledge has served to dethrone man from his assumed position of centrality in the universe.  Our knowledge of cosmology has made planet earth just one other planet in one solar system in one of many, many galaxies; our knowledge of evolutionary biology has made man but one branch among many, many other actual and potential organic permutations, and so on.  This has a pleasant air both of humility and veiled self-congratulation about it (what but our own mighty intellects divined such things?), but James went much further.  After centuries of domination by the Mind of God and the godlike minds of rational philosophers and scientists, James asserted that the very medium of rational intelligence doing all the dethroning was itself just one specific type of consciousness, among many others; and the type of world or reality which that type of consciousness apprehended was just one of many worlds and realities actualized under each separate medium of conscious awareness.  We can note the similarity of this to a central underlying concept in weird fiction: that our world, unbeknownst to us, intersects with a variety of alternative realities and alien orders of being, separated from our cosy assumptions of normalcy by the "filmiest of screens."  Or, in the later words of another great American philosopher, "You unlock this door with the key of imagination.  Beyond it is another dimension - a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind.  You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas.  You've just crossed over into the twilight zone."  Dorothy was about to step out of the maelstrom and wreckage of the Old World into the Technicolor soundstage of Oz.

          Drawing on the theories of Henri Bergson, Aldous Huxley elaborated on this idea of rational, everyday consciousness as a kind of a reducing valve (which would become crucial to the emerging psychedelic movement) in The Doors of Perception:  "But so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive.  To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system.  What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help  us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet."  For Huxley, then, ordinary consciousness had evolved in order to facilitate the utilitarian, Darwinian business of staying alive and reproducing on planet earth; in its deeper strata, however, this utilitarian brain connected up with a kind of Platonic universal consciousness with Huxley labelled Mind at Large, or in the Doors' sequel Heaven and Hell, the visionary antipodes of the human psyche.  Again, we find the metaphor (if it is even that) of other worlds intersecting with our own:  "That which, in the language of religion, is called 'the world' is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed and, as it were, petrified by language.  The various 'other worlds,' with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large.  Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language."  

          I've tended to regard surrealism, weird fiction, and the later psychedelic movement as the separate strands of a single cultural history which all emerged out of the same basic appetites, and which all converged, by their separate routes, on the same essential mental terrains and vistas.  The internal struggle in H.P. Lovecraft between the rational and visionary faculties was being played out in a western culture at large which was disillusioned with the age of industrial assembly lines and corpse-strewn trenches; and weird fiction and surrealism were a two-pronged assault on Mind at Large which serendipitously found the perfect chemical analogue to its inner explorations with the advent of the psychedelic era.  Chronologically, surrealism and weird fiction were closely aligned.  Although its European roots go back a ways, weird fiction as a fully crystallized literary genre was a phenomenon of the 20s and 30s.  Weird Tales was first published in 1923 (what other year?); a year later Andre Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto.  1924 was also the year in which Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg began to formulate the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, capping off one of the most genuinely mind-bending eras of discovery in the history of science.  Then, of course, in 1938 Albert Hoffman first synthesized LSD, and all but forget about it until a "peculiar presentiment" in '43 lead him to take his historic bike ride into the antipodes of the human psyche.  As Charles Fort once observed, "a social growth cannot find out the use of steam-engines, until comes steam-engine-time."  The visions of surrealism and weird fiction had become odorless, tasteless, and soluble in water.  The internal combustion engine of the mind had arrived.

        For readers who are perhaps skeptical of the weird fiction/psychedelia connection, I'm going to finish up with a quick look at the most remarkably proto-psychedelic of all weird fictions, Clark Ashton Smith's 1931 masterpiece The City of the Singing Flame.  The first part of the story is told from the perspective of Giles Angarth, a writer of weird fiction.  While holidaying in a cabin in a remote area of the Sierras, Angarth discovers on a trek a "clear space amid the rubble in which nothing grew - a space that was round as an artificial ring.  In its center were two isolated boulders, queerly alike in shape, and lying about five apart."  Stepping through these peculiar monoliths, Angarth discovers that he has passed through a dimensional gateway into a strange other realm: "I had read a number of transdimensional stories - in fact, I had written one or two myself; and I had often pondered the possibility of other worlds or material planes which may co-exist in the same space with ours, invisible and impalpable to human senses.  Of course, I realized at once that I had fallen into some such dimension."  Angarth finds himself in a vast plain of violet grasses and forests of weird, alien vegetation, over which towers an ancient city of red stone and solemn, rectilinear architecture.  Exploring the city, he finds that it contains a temple wherein a great green flame burns from a central pit.  The flame emanates a kind of hypnotic music, and exerts a strange magnetic attraction; Angarth watches as entities from various distant planets arrive in the temple, and throw themselves into the heart of the green flame.  When Angarth finally looks directly at the flame, we find a passage which reads uncannily like a description of the effects of mescaline or LSD:

           "The fire was green and dazzling, pure as the central flame of a star; it blinded me, and when I turned my eyes away, the air was filled with webs of intricate colour, with swiftly changing arabesques whose numberless, unwonted hues and patterns were such as no mundane eye had ever beheld.  And I felt a stimulating warmth that filled my very marrow with intenser life...."

            It is only, however, when the second narrator leaps into the green flame that Smith's language take its full flight into the visionary antipodes:

          "It was as if we no longer existed, except as one divine, indivisible entity, soaring beyond the trammels of matter, beyond the limits of time and space, to attain undreamable shores.  Unspeakable was the joy, and infinite the freedom of that ascent, in which we seemed to overpass the zenith of the highest star.  Then, as if we had risen with the Flame to its culmination, had reached its very apex, we emerged and came to a pause."

          "My senses were faint with exaltation, my eyes blind with the glory of the fire; and the world on which I now gazed was a vast arabesque of unfamiliar forms and bewildering hues from another spectrum than the one to which our eyes are habituated.  It swirled before my dizzy eyes like a labyrinth of gigantic jewels, with interweaving rays and tangled lustres, and only by slow degrees was I able to establish order and distinguish detail in the surging riot of my perceptions."

        "All about me were endless avenues of super-prismatic opal and jacinth; arches and pillars of ultra-violet gems, of transcendent sapphire, of unearthly ruby and amethyst, all suffused with a multi-tinted splendor.  I appeared to be treading on jewels, and above me was a jeweled sky."

        Reading the story fully through, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Smith either had a direct experience with a psychedelic substance (most likely peyote), or had somehow managed to trigger in his brain the precise neurochemical reactions of a HEAVY psychedelic trip.  Either way, The City of the Singing Flame is a remarkable adumbration of the psychedelic zeitgeist which was some three decades ahead of its publication date.  Adventures of future science indeed:

 Part one of two - concluded shortly.

I got the image of Cthulhu here.   Weirdly, this spell check recognizes Cthulhu.

I got the images of The City of the Singing Flame here, at a post where John Coulthart also discusses the story's proto-psychedelic qualities.

You can read The City of the Singing Flame in its entirety here, courtesy of Eldritch Dark.

The House on the Borderland: William Hope Hodgson and the Birth of Cosmic Horror.

The Shock of the New Universe.

The 18^th and 19^th centuries witnessed a fundamental and radical shock to how we conceive of the universe and our place in it. Prior to that shift, the order of the universe was seen as something which contained a basic semblance to the order of our own minds, however elevated from us in grandeur and complexity. The universe and the natural world were felt to embody an intentionality, a purpose, and a moral dimension like that of the human world. The scientific revolution engendered a new way of thinking about the universe, whereby the natural and the human worlds would gradually be seen as wholly separated and intrinsically different from one another. The human world would increasingly come to be seen as a contingent and minor event occurring in a vast cosmos that possessed no intentionality, no purpose, and no moral dimension; hence, the human world becomes a tiny, fragile enclave hopelessly projecting its dreams and fantasies onto a vast, abstract and fundamentally alien cosmos. This was a profound transformation from the cosmos of the ancient Greeks, for example, where the goodwill of the gods might be solicited by ritual, sacrifice, and pious conduct, or the cosmos of the Middle Ages, where the poet could ascend the ladder of being and be vouchsafed a vision of the “love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

The socially realistic novel of the 18^th and 19^th centuries completely lacked the vocabulary to reflect the disorientation and shock of this new vision of the cosmos. The literatures of the antique world tended by their nature towards a cosmic perspective: in creation myths, heroic epics, and the later allegories and dream visions of the Christian period, the human being was overwhelmingly conceptualized in terms of its relation to the whole cosmic sphere. In this regard, the literatures of antiquity had a tendency to examine human nature from a universal and existential perspective. The general evolution of literature in the modern period, in contrast, followed after the trajectory of the microscope: its focus shifted from the cosmic perspective to that of the social and psychological, and from the universal and eternal to the local and contemporary. With the upheavals engendered by the age of scientific discovery, a new type of literature was required which could attempt to view humankind once again from the necessarily existential vantage of the vastness of time and space. New myths were required to orient ourselves to the shock of the new cosmos. This need, of course, goes some way to explain the explosion of science fiction and fantastic literature in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The emergence of strange and exotic ideas requires a suitably exotic fictional medium to process them. Realistic fiction delineates the immediate world with journalistic scrupulousness; only, however, in the mythical and fantastic register can the effects of a major change to the dominant worldview be traced, and its effects on the realm of the unconscious accurately recorded. The paradox here is that the antique and irrational often proved to be the most effective fictional medium with which to express the shock of the newly objectified and rationalized cosmos, and nobody exemplified this paradox better than H.P. Lovecraft.

“Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension.”

Lovecraft, The Dreams in the Witch-House.

In science fiction itself, the greatest expression of the new cosmic sensibility came in two novels by the British author and philosopher Olaf Stapledon: Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future (1930), and Star Maker (1937).

Last and First Men was a speculative “future history” which traces the human race through eighteen future evolutionary offshoots, spanning a mind-boggling two billion years; Star Maker was an even loftier and more ambitious attempt to chart the history of the universe itself. Possessing enough imagination and ideas for about ten or twenty speculative writers, Stapledon’s two classics are probably the finest works ever produced under the parameters of pure science fiction. Like Wells, however, Stapleton was essentially optimistic about the implications of the newly emerging scientific view of the cosmos. In this sense, while both writers were truly great mythologists of the scientific worldview, neither might be said to have fully captured its visceral sense of shock and disorientation to conventional human values. H.P. Lovecraft, on the other hand, was ideally constituted to do so by virtue of certain odd and paradoxical personal characteristics. On the surface, Lovecraft was as enthusiastic an advocate of the scientific worldview as Wells or Stapleton; his basic philosophical orientation appears to have been that of a thorough-going rationalist materialism that wouldn’t be out of place among contemporary New Atheists. Yet Lovecraft was also a man haunted by various severe neurotic maladies that were inextricably linked with very vivid, visionary dreams and nightmares. It was through a marriage of these extreme oppositional forces of the rational and irrational that Lovecraft’s fiction derived its unique character.

All of Lovecraft’s greatest tales were essentially a dramatization of a philosophical viewpoint which he labelled cosmicism. Cosmicism cast the implications of the scientific view of the universe in extreme, nihilistic terms, arguing for the total insignificance of human beings and human value systems in the face of the vastness of space and time. According to Lovecraft’s cosmicist outlook, our increasing knowledge of the universe constituted a microscope, whereby we could view ourselves for the first time as a kind of miniscule, crawling bacteria:

Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form - and the local human passions and conditions and standards - are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all….. when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown - the shadow-haunted Outside - we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold.

Hence, despite his great enthusiasm for science, Lovecraft’s great fictions depict true knowledge of the universe as a forbidden and hideous thing; a dark, negative gnosis of the true emptiness of all human aspirations and the horror of the biological existence to which they are temporarily shackled. The forbidden apple in the Garden of Eden brought Adam and Eve a knowledge of life and death; in Lovecraft’s cosmos, the forbidden apple of objective knowledge brings something far worse: the knowledge that life and death simply don’t mean anything:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (The Call of Cthulhu)

It remains slightly paradoxical that Lovecraft should elaborate this modern scientific theme by means of an atavistic return of ancient gods and antique terrors, or that an avowed enthusiast of scientific materialism should present its ultimate fruits as being so bleak as to send the species either insane or into the embrace a “new dark age”, but that’s an argument for another occasion. This intuition – that the very defining characteristics of the modern worldview might best be viewed through a literary prism of the antique, the primitive, and the superstitious – forms the backbone of cosmic horror, a little-practised sub-genre of popular fiction that mixes elements of gothic horror with the cosmic perspectives and extra-terrestrial/dimensional themes of science fiction. Lovecraft was the first theorist of cosmic horror, and remains its most noted practitioner; his major precursor, however, was William Hope Hodgson, whose remarkable 1908 novel The House on the Borderland is probably the first authentic expression of cosmic horror.

Borderland is a really strange, almost inexplicable book. Its plot is simple enough on the surface. In 1877, two British gentlemen travel to a small, isolated village in the West of Ireland for a fishing holiday. While exploring the local country-side, they discover what appear to be the remnants of an old house bordering a water-logged pit, and an old manuscript nearby. The manuscript is written by the former owner of the ruined house, a figure whom we know only as the Recluse. The Recluse, we learn, lives a quiet, sedentary existence in the isolated house which he shares with his sister and his faithful hound “Pepper.” There is, however, a strange, unsettling quality to the house and its surroundings; or perhaps only in the mind of the Recluse himself. He soon has a vision in which his consciousness is transported across interstellar space to an eerie plain which he calls the arena or the plain of silence. At its centre, the plain contains an exact, though much larger replica of his house back on earth, constructed of a green jade-like substance. On hillsides surrounding the jade house, the Recluse sees a plethora of ancient gods and monstrosities that seem to exist in a kind of watchful half-slumber:

Now I saw that there were other things up among the mountains. Further off, reclining on a lofty ledge, I made out a livid mass irregular and ghoulish. It seemed without form, save for an unclean, half-animal face, that looked out, vilely, from somewhere about its middle. And then, I saw others – there were hundreds of them. They seemed to grow out of the shadows. Several, I recognised, almost immediately, as mythological deities; others were strange to me, utterly strange, beyond the power a human mind to conceive.

Shortly after this vision, the Recluse begins to explore the pit near the house, whereupon he is attacked by a group of savage porcine humanoids which he christens the Swine Things. A prolonged siege and struggle with the Swine Things ensues, and the Recluse, after killing several of them, appears to emerge as the victor. This is followed by the novel’s most remarkable and justifiably acclaimed section, in which the Recluse has a vision of time speeding up in an effect similar to that of time lapse photography: days and nights fly by with increasing velocity until they blur together into a vertiginous continuous dusk; in passages that alternate between awesome psychedelic beauty and a stark sense of absolute cosmic loneliness, the Recluse witnesses whole ages and eons pass by before his eyes, extending all the way to the slow atrophy and death of the sun, and the end of the world.

The House on the Borderland's originality and strangeness made it an important precursor to a variety of strains of later science fiction and horror. Hodgson's visionary cosmic odysseys predated those of Stapledon, and might be said to have instigated an imaginative tradition that extends all the way to the cinematic journey through the Stargate in Kubrick's 2001. The Recluse's desperate struggle for survival while besieged by the Swine Things must surely be the first elaberation of all the classic tropes of the modern zombie genre, coming long before Richard Matheson's more widely read I am Legend. Hodgson's work also provided the vital spark to Lovecraft's transformation of his personal misanthopric philosophy into a kind of pulp mythology of the age of evolution, Einstein, and quantum mechanics. But The House on the Borderlands stands on its own merits as one of those strange and almost ineffable works of the British visionary imagination. It's greatest virtue lies in the fact that it makes no effort whatever to explain any of itself: the origin of the Swine Things, the true nature of the Recluse's cosmic and interdimensial visions remain as pointedly specific and inexplicable as the details of a nightmare. In a lesser writer, this total lack of explanation would have reflected a shoddy sense of construction; but in Hodgson it imparts a genuine and subtly unsettling sense of otherness, as Clark Ashton Smith points out in his Apprecation of the author:

In some ways, Hodgson's work is no doubt most readily comparable to that of Algernon Blackwood. But I am not sure that even Blackwood has managed to intimate a feeling of such profound and pervasive familiarity with the occult as one finds in The house on the Borderland. Hideous phantoms and unknown monsters from the nightward gulf are adumbrated in all their terror, with no dispelling of their native mystery; and surely such things could be described only by a seer who has dwelt overlong on the perilous verges and has peered too deeply into the regions veiled by invisibility from normal sight.