The Night Land, abridged edition

A romance of the far future, in which humankind has relocated underground, where it is beset by monsters from another dimensionbut love leads on. In the far future, humankinds survivors huddle below Earths frozen surface in a pyramidal fortress-city that, for centuries now, has been under siege by loathsome Ab-humans, enormous slugs and spiders, and malevolent Watching Things from another dimension. When our unnamed protagonist receives a telepathic distress signal from a woman whom (in a previous incarnation) hed once loved, he sallies forth on an ill-advised rescue missioninto the fiend-haunted Night Land! Like certain rare dreams, C. S. Lewis wrote of Hodgsons masterpiece, The Night Land can give sensations we never had before and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience. H. P. Lovecraft agreed that this is one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written. William Hope Hodgson (18771918) was an English poet, sailor, bodybuilder, and weird fiction pioneer whose horror, fantastic, and proto-sf novelsin addition to The Night Landinclude The Boats of the Glen Carrig (1907), The House on the Borderland (1908), and The Ghost Pirates (1909). He also wrote stories in the Sargasso Sea series, the Captain Gault series, and a series about the occult detective Carnacki.