Edinburgh Napier University

  Biographical accounts of William Hope Hodgson naturally tend to focus on two main features of his career before he became a full-time writer: sailing and physical culture (Everts). Both provide useful contexts for reading Hodgson’s fiction. In some examples, it is easy to see how these two formative areas of his life experience converge—in the gladiatorial muscularity of Captain Dang in an unfinished sea novel; or in the anxieties over the integrity of the human body dramatized in The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” (1907) (Hurley). In other texts, such as The Night Land (1912), this convergence is far less obvious; the protagonist’s obsession with physicality is evident, but the contribution of Hodgson’s sailing experiences is not immediately so. However, given that the sea shapes the characters, defines the settings, and informs the plot of so many of Hodgson’s major tales, it would be surprising if it should not also be highly narratively and metaphorically significant to his two land-locked weird science fiction novels, The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land.