Jesse’s Reviews > The Night Land and Other Perilous Romances: The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson, Volume 4 > Status Update

“A Timely Escape”

A dude with genuine raw talent is hanging out with a famous man with pretensions, at the risk of his relationship with his girlfriend. There is a distinct vampire vibe to this story but it isn’t blood that ol’ Vivian is sucking out of the young man but his budding weird fiction stories. The ladies in this one sort of save the day, though not by beating the shit out of Vivian as he deserves.

“Kind, Kind and Gentle is She”

A downbeat romance where Murphy, a strapping young soldier, falls in love with the Captain’s fiancé while they are practicing for some sort of a pageant. When their base is attacked, he lies down his life for Mary in a love-frenzy much like the climax of The Night Land, but where he was basically devoted to Mary in his heart, she was only flirting in circumstance.

“The Girl With the Grey Eyes”

An increasingly desperate series of wacky schemes where the MC’s buddy tries to get the attention of a girl he had fallen in love with before coming to Australia. She’s just stuck with some red-headed fellow, though, who is a tough customer, not to be shaken and quite a gentleman. Of course, it’s not hard to predict that the dude she is traveling with is her brother.

“In the Wailing Gully”

This one is fun. I mean, Hodgson is forever the short man disease guy, but he starts out as a painter who is taking holiday on a village and attracting the attention of the local Squire’s daughter, who is bluntly sassy and also an excellent swimmer. The two of them find buried treasure and fend off an attack by retired pirates, the MC toting his newly beloved a la The Night Land.

“The Smugglers”

A very cute story where this time the MC is the officer thwarting smugglers who are operating on behalf of the gentry. Our narrator is a certified badass but falls in love with one of the main man’s sisters, and drama ensues. Their courtship is used by her brother to circumvent the counter-smuggling operations, but while she was sort of in on it, she fell just as madly in love with the MC.

“The Captain of the Onion Boat”

The anatomy of a long-overdue “rescue” from a convent where a woman took vows, believing that her betrothed husband was dead, only to discover later that he had survived falling overboard, and the eight subsequent years of smoldering desire as he came again and again to the window of the convent where they could see each other if only but for a moment.

“The Night Land”

An epic romance that takes place after the end of the world. It has a weird, artificial diction that serves to impose a language barrier between the narrator in his talking to us from 1,000,000 years in the future. It comes across as a blend of Arthurian knight fiction and Biblical prose.

You HAD ME you magnificent bastard!! It’s a fine trick to get a jaded reader to wish that you deliver a cop-out ending and then you get it and I was just rolling in goosebumps when Hodgson has his cake and eats it, too. The final peril is such a blur because once Naani is stricken by the House of Silence, the MC turns into a murder machine that is slaughtering evil in his death march to the Redoubt.

Naani’s character is infuriating as her confluence of love and trauma and impishness has her constantly testing just how far she can push the MC, which ends with him whipping her on her shoulders, immediately followed by her digressions giving the Humpt Men time to gather a small army to slay them. I assume that there is also a symbolic logic in her being naked when she leads the few Humpt survivors away.

OMFG NO. For every cool scene where they are dealing with horrors like the gargantuan white slug of the gorge, there are swaths of their relationship dynamic marked with foot fetish toe-kissing and on the other extreme the MC shaking or WHIPPING Naani due to her “impudence”, which is all part of a game for her as she tests his boundaries. The archaic narrative voice robs the romance of much of its vitality.