In 1908 a former merchant seaman published a novel that would quietly
reshape horror fiction.
Two anglers, fishing in the west of Ireland, discover the ruins of an
isolated house and a tattered manuscript inside it. What they read is the
journal of a man who lived there alone with his sister and his dog — and
who found, behind the house, a vast pit from which things were climbing.
What begins as Gothic country-house horror opens without warning into
something no English novel had attempted: the death of the sun, the
cooling of the earth, and the long silence at the end of the universe.
H. P. Lovecraft called it a classic of the first water and named Hodgson
among the essential predecessors to his own work. Cosmic horror as a genre
begins here.
This unabridged recording presents the complete 1908 text, followed by a
new critical introduction and a biographical essay by Alexander Kross.
