HODGSON, William Hope.

£2,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The House on the Borderland and other novels. First collected edition, the fantasy and horror writer Clark Ashton Smith's copy, with his signature on the front free endpaper. Both Smith and Hodgson were among the first writers published by August Derleth's Arkham House: Smith's Out of Space and Time (1942) was the third book issued by the publisher (after H. P. Lovecraft's The Outsider and Others and Derleth's own Someone in the Dark), and the present volume of Hodgson's fiction followed just four years later."Long neglected and unappreciated" (Bleiler), Hodgson had few dedicated readers in the decades after his death, but in 1944, his work was re-evaluated when Smith wrote an influential essay, "In Appreciation of William Hope Hodgson". "It would be impossible to withhold the rank of master from an author who has achieved so authoritatively, in volume after volume, a quality that one might term the realism of the unreal." He compares Hodgson's writing to the prolific ghost-story writer Algernon Blackwood, noting Blackwood never "managed to intimate a feeling of such profound and pervasive familiarity with the occult as one finds in The House on the Borderland. Hideous phantoms and unknown monsters from the nightward gulf are adumbrated in all their terror, with no dispelling of their native mystery; and surely such things could be described only by a seer who has dwelt overlong on the perilous verges and has peered too deeply into the regions veiled by invisibility from norm

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