William Hope Hodgson
La casa sull'abisso

The House On The Borderland is a “nightmare” novel that describes the harrowing vicissitudes of a “Recluse,” living with his sister and the dog Pepper, in a remote Irish house located in a region unknown to maps near the village of Kraighten: the house becomes the focal point where hallucinatory and diabolical extra-cosmic powers are unleashed, taking the form of hideous pig-like creatures, symbolizing the ghosts that lurk in the human psyche brought to light by Freud, demonstrating the extreme modernity of the “hodgsonian” work. The house, with its rooms, is a sort of metaphor for the human being: the upper part aspires to the sky and Paradise, while the cellar symbolizes the darkest side where personal hells lurk, hiding the monsters concealed in the unconscious.

The atmosphere that pervades is one of absolute metaphysical solitude that makes the work unique in its genre: the Recluse dedicates himself to study and spends much of his time in the writing room. One day, the sister is attacked by the mysterious pig-like creatures: it is the beginning of a ruthless siege in which the Recluse will defend himself by all means, shooting the monsters. At this point, he begins a thorough exploration of the surroundings of the house: he discovers that the house is suspended on a rock above an unfathomable pit: a true Abyss. He then explores the cellars where he discovers an oak trapdoor that protects the house from an enigmatic well: he will later discover it is an extension of the Abyss.

During his misadventures, the Recluse will have terrifying “visions” in which the house is reproduced on a gigantic scale and is besieged by a huge green pig-like being. In another hallucination, he “sees” – in a true journey beyond time and space - the collapse of the solar system and the Earth and is catapulted to the center of the universe where he confronts 2 suns, one black and one green: this “vision” represents something truly incredible: it is the very essence of cosmic horror and foreshadows and surpasses much subsequent science fiction. From the green sun, globes detach into which he manages to penetrate and “see” his “beloved” and find peace in a sort of limbo called the “sea of sleep.” From the black one, dark globes emerge, projecting him into a sort of Hell named the “Plain of Silence” where he sees the house besieged by the gigantic creature and enters it. Here, his “initiatory” journey, full of symbolism hinted at by Hodgson at the beginning of the text, ends. The protagonist's metaphysical and temporal journey is what is known as a true “astral journey.” This “occult” aspect of the novel is not so surprising considering that these themes were widely diffused at the time: just think of the fame of a character like Crowley and the famous Golden Dawn, a secret society based on the Qabalah of which Hodgson, unlike Arthur Machen and other famous names, was never a part.

The abysses lurking beneath the house from which extraterrestrial beings emerge are a metaphor for the unfathomable secrets of the human unconscious. The House On The Borderland is full of hermetic and esoteric references: the book can be “read” on both a microcosmic and a macrocosmic level. It’s no coincidence that the famous critic Jacques Van Herp defined it as “a level of interpretation of other levels”, a most fitting definition that fully captures the “nightmarish” atmosphere of the novel. The house is located “on the borderland,” meaning on the boundary of other unknown dimensions of reality. The building represents the microcosm, a sort of “small personal Hell” of the protagonist, while the gigantic model of the building in the Plain of Silence that the Recluse sees in his “vision” symbolizes the macrocosm. The structure of the various “levels” and models of the house seem to reflect the words of the great Hermes Trismegistus: “what is below is like what is above, and what is above is like what is below, to accomplish the miracles of the one reality.”

It was the Arkham House, the publishing house founded by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei to spread and preserve the Lovecraftian “corpus” of narratives, that reissued The House On The Borderland in 1946, thus contributing to preserving and spreading the fame of this great author of the fantastic. It should be remembered how Lovecraft was greatly impressed by the narrative of the English writer, dedicating many pages to him in his well-known essay Supernatural Horror In Literature where he describes The House On The Borderland thus: “The author's spirit wanderings through limitless light-years of cosmic space and kalpas of eternity and his chronicle of the ultimate destruction of the solar system, constitute something almost unique in contemporary literature.” Lovecraft praised in this way the grand cosmic imagination and was no doubt influenced, as can be appreciated in the famous story The Shadow Over Innsmouth, where amphibian beings described by Lovecraft bear more than an affinity with the teratoform entities of The House On The Borderland.

In Italy, the novel initially came out in 1953 in one of the first issues of Urania, in a “cut” and condensed version with the curious title Oltre il Futuro under the aegis of Giorgio Monicelli. This demonstrates how the delirious cosmic extrasensory journeys described in this novel have, as mentioned, many points of contact with science fiction. Finally, The House On The Borderland was published in 1963 in the anthology Universo a sette incognite edited by Fruttero e Lucentini, although in a non-integral version: the two well-known curators did not hesitate to define it as “an unknown masterpiece.” After being included in the I Miti di Cthulhu series of Fanucci in a version that was overall acceptable though not completely satisfying, it was finally published in I classici Urania with a new translation that respected Hodgson's characteristic language rich in archaisms, an aspect that adds particular charm to the novel. The critical apparatus is then noteworthy: the edition was curated by the expert Gianfranco De Turris, author of a thorough examination of the novel on a symbolic level and also included a biographical essay by Alex Voglino and an accurate bibliography by Pietro Guarriello, one of the foremost experts of fantastic literature in Italy. This version was recently published in the volume I Miti di Cthulhu just published in the Oscar Draghi Mondadori.

Italian bibliography of The House On The Borderland

Urania magazine no. 8 (Contains ‘Oltre il Futuro, the first condensed version of “The House On The Borderland” in Italy, 1953)
“La casa sull’abisso” (within the anthology “Universo a sette incognite,” 1963)
“La casa sull’abisso” (Fanucci – series “I miti di Cthulhu,” 1985)
“La casa sull’abisso” (Classici Urania no. 237, 1996)
“La casa sull’abisso” (comic adaptation by Richard Corben and Simon Revelstroke, Magic Press, 2004)

“I Miti di Cthulhu” Oscar Draghi Mondadori (2019)