Reddit Reddit reviews The Night Land, A Story Retold

We found 3 Reddit comments about The Night Land, A Story Retold. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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The Night Land, A Story Retold
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3 Reddit comments about The Night Land, A Story Retold:

u/takashi_kurita · 20 pointsr/40kLore

Here is the original:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10662

Be warned. This book is tough. I mean, the act of reading it is tough. It was written at the turn of the century (1901) and in an intentionally archaic style, so like a 17th century book. Also it contains some *really old-fashioned and offensive social ideas, btw.

So it's an impenetrable mass of words. Grammatically, this is like the Dark Souls of sentence structure. Unknown realms of sentence fragments and run-ons await the daring reader.

What I recommend instead is the modernized remake:
https://www.amazon.com/Night-Land-Story-Retold-ebook/dp/B004GKNM3W/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

It's still written in an old style, but more like 1940's English rather than pseudo-Age-of-Sail Englyshe. It retains all the wonder and majesty and awe-inspiring evil of the original work, while actually being readable and giving the characters actual dialogue (the original story had none!) and making them relatable to modern-day human beings.

u/hesaidadverbsly · 2 pointsr/WeirdLit
u/Hexatona · 2 pointsr/pics

From what I've heard, One of Hodgson's earlier works... The House on the Borderland, was quite influential on Lovecraft.

Anyway, I'm going to be 100% honest here in that I nearly gave up on The Night Land. His writing style (at least in this book) is deliberately archaic. It's palatable when he's just being an overly verbose sentence mangler, but when he tries to be all poetic it's just the worst.

Thankfully, the worst of it is in the first chapter. If you can survive The first two chapters, I think you'll love it!

I'm actually listening to the librivox recording of it, myself. You really have to pay attention.

As for simmilarities between their works, Hodgson is at both times more plain, and also just as vague. He does a wonderful job of setting up the world as terribly malevolent, very plainly, but the malevolence is so incomprehensible that you are left with the dread feeling of humanity being trapped by things it couldn't possibly understand.

I can completely understand why The Night Lands is so well respected, and I can also understand why it is proabbly completely unknown - reading the first chapter is like trying to force yourself to understand shakespeare in highschool, but it gets better quickly once he stops being a poet about it.

As a total aside, someone went ahead a rewrote the Night Land to be more accessible. I have not tried it yet, but there it is.