Rating: 
Summary: An absolutely unique vision
Review: (This review is written with the earlier Amazon.com reviews in mind)The ideas in The Night Land and in Hodgson's other early novel The House On The Borderland seem to have been derived from Wells The Time Machine. You can imagine the book as an attempt to map out the survival of humanity into, and beyond, the time of end of that story - the red sun, the beach, the swollen, flopping, things. Wells believed (with educated men of his time) that the sun had a lifetime of the order of 50 million years: therefore the idea of human survival into the Night was not as implausible as it might seem today. What is unique about Hodgson is the fertility of his imagination and - and I find this extremely attractive - the way he mixes supernatural and scientific explanations for everything so completely there is really no separation. Some of the things that besiege the Last Redoubt are degenerate humans; some are animal; some come from other dimensions and have been let into this world by corrupt future sciences; many are hybrid of all three sources. Yet the most formidible, carnivorous psychic entities which will eat the souls of any human being they catch, are kept off from the Redoubt by what is unquestionably a technologically produced force field (maybe the first time this idea has ever been used in fantasy?). The book has a flavour of ideas which no other has ever duplicated. There are things in it, merely thrown away, that could create whole sub-genres of fantastic and imaginative literature. For example, there is one point in the return journey where the heroine (remembering one of her many past lives) remembers a time when The Cities went always to the Westwards - a vision of a great metal roadway with cities on it moving round the slowed-rotation world in time with the Sun. These cities take in the harvest; others (forward on the road) have sewn the seeds; and behind comes a year-long night. The hero strains to remember his own life in that age, and cannot. And this - tremendous image - is one paragraph. I cannot excuse the writing style, or the author's attitude to women, but I deny that these things are enough to make the book worthless. As well as being a tremendous adventure story it is a picture of THE END of humanity, as we are the beginning - and it succeeds in implying the whole span of humanity between those two points. For all its faults, I have never found a book to compare with it.
Rating: 
Summary: Dark Future
Review: Disgruntled English students usually think they are suffering when they are made to read William Golding's "Lord of the Flies". They say the symbolism is too confusing, too hard to understand etc. But that book is a walk in the park compared to "The Night Land". It is no exaggeration to say that, unless one is prepared to make an effort, reading this book can be exquisitely painful. In order to avoid getting a headache I was obliged to read in short bursts, or until the words started spinning in front of my eyes. The writing of "The Night Land" is the deepest shade of purple prose imaginable. Exceedingly dense, flowery, and, in some parts, almost indecipherable. Curiously, I still wanted to finish it. Despite the critic's warnings, I couldn't resist the story: the remaining inhabitants of Earth (a handful of millions) surviving in a future that has long been dark, desolate and hostile since the death of the sun. A cordon of lumbering, monolithic creatures inching their way toward the Last Redoubt, where the humans are sheltered. While reading "The Night Land" I was, to a certain extent, reminded of Camille Flammarion's "Omega: the Last Days of the World" (1893). Both books are fairly bleak visions presenting an Earth disturbingly changed by the aeons. Both have an element of Victorian-era romance where the heroes set out and eventually find their Intended Ones. "Omega" is far more easy to comprehend, however. It gradually eases the reader into the remote future, preparing him or her for the shock of change. "The Night Land" cuts right to the chase. The narrator, a grieving widow in the first chapter, "awakes" in the future with a different body, completely familiar with his surroundings, looking on his past life like a vaguely remembered dream. Like other readers, I would have enjoyed the book more if it weren't for the language. There did seem a bit too much padding and a frustrating sense of going round in circles. The romance can only be described as mawkish. Hodgson does do a good job at evoking a feeling of dislocation though. Making the future look confusing and bewildering to outsiders like ourselves. If you want to read a book that plays with language, I would like to suggest "Riddley Walker" by Russell Hoban. It's only set a few thousand years from now, but it does evoke the feeling of another era through language more convincingly than Hodgson's attempt.
Rating:
Summary: the night land is an archetpal love story
Review: hodgson is able to throw a mood over you as you read this book in much the same way that raymond chandler can-although this is a somewhat different mood. if you do not get caught up in the emotional intensity of the story, finding yourself yelling out encouragement to the protagonist and having a complete catharsis at the story's resolution you probably lack the basic ingredients to qualify for humanity
Rating: 
Summary: Magnificent, but poorly written fantasy.
Review: Hodgson wrote a number of fantasy works before the First World War which attracted favourable comment, especially his "Carnacki the Ghost Hunter" stories. The "Night Land" was his greatest work, both in its expanse of imagination and its sombre staging. The first few chapters, once you pass the laboured plot gimmick of a dream state from which this fantastic story set in the very,very far distant future is related, are very good. The imagery of the Last Redoubt, a doomed fortress at the end of the world, beset by "unspeakable" horrors waiting for its defences to fail as the prelude to the extinction of humanity, is magnificent. After that the mock antique language, "love" story, and overall length of the story kill this promising beginning. Brian Aldiss described the work as "flaring into magnificence", a comment one publisher promptly embellished the blurb with, before adding "fades into unreadibility". Aldiss was right. Buy it or read it for the first few chapters. Hodgson never bettered the atmosphere of dread in this book, save for some his short sea horror stories (Peter Haining made a collection of these in a "Master of Terror" series) which have some genuinely disturbing imagery.
Rating:
Summary: Magnificent, but poorly written fantasy.
Review: Hodgson wrote a number of fantasy works before the First World War which attracted favourable comment, especially his "Carnacki the Ghost Hunter" stories. The "Night Land" was his greatest work, both in its expanse of imagination and its sombre staging. The first few chapters, once you pass the laboured plot gimmick of a dream state from which this fantastic story set in the very,very far distant future is related, are very good. The imagery of the Last Redoubt, a doomed fortress at the end of the world, beset by "unspeakable" horrors waiting for its defences to fail as the prelude to the extinction of humanity, is magnificent. After that the mock antique language, "love" story, and overall length of the story kill this promising beginning. Brian Aldiss described the work as "flaring into magnificence", a comment one publisher promptly embellished the blurb with, before adding "fades into unreadibility". Aldiss was right. Buy it or read it for the first few chapters. Hodgson never bettered the atmosphere of dread in this book, save for some his short sea horror stories (Peter Haining made a collection of these in a "Master of Terror" series) which have some genuinely disturbing imagery.
Rating:
Summary: Great premise but horribly written...
Review: Hodgson's The Night Land (published in 1912) is frequently cited as one of the great masterpieces of horror and fantasy fiction. Well, in terms of premise and ideas (and to an extent the basic plot), I'd agree. However, the characterization (esp. of women) and the writing style of this novel is absymal- it's nearly unreadable. Hodgson uses a mock-miedevil writing style for reasons known only to himself. I've read most of Hodgson's novels (four out of five) and this is easily the worst-written of them all (Boats of the Glen Carig is similarly flawed)-and it's a near-fatal flaw. As far as I'm concerned, Hodgson's "House on the Borderland" (published in 1908) remains his only masterpiece. In fact, I've read an interesting article which suggests that Hodgson published his novels in the reverse-order of their actual writing, which means that House would've been one of his last works, i.e., he improved with time.
Rating: 
Summary: 1st half great, 2nd half hard to get thru
Review: I found the first half of _The Night Land_ engrossing, with its strange near-mythic imagery and storyline. The future Earth, outside the huge pyramidal enclave of the Last Redoubt (where the narrator lives), is perhaps both the most alien and the most suggestive future landscape I've ever heard described. I think Hodgson's unusual use of adjectival phrases as proper names for strange future races, is partly to account for this. (I wish I had the book in front of me so that I could give an example.) Once the narrator travels to the "other redoubt," however, and meets up with the woman he'd contacted, I found the going a little too plodding; it failed to sustain my interest, and I never got more than 3/4 of the way thru the whole book. Even so, for its incredible strangeness, I give this 4 stars as one of the most memorable works of fantasy that I've ever read. Footnote: I read this book in the 1970's-vintage Ballantine Adult Fantasy two-volume paperback edition (long out of print), thus my reference to "first" and "second" half correspond roughly to the first and second volumes of this edition.
Rating:
Summary: Magnificent product of its era
Review: I strongly feel that this book must be read in the context of other books of its era, as well as the artistic and poetical zeitgeist, and not only those if the era in whch it was written, but that in which the beginning and the personality of the narrator is set. This is a book such as Wagner would have written, Wilde would have rejoiced in, Swinburne been inspired by. The enormity of the canvas, the breadth of field, all are characteristic of the fin de siecle romantic disaster in its best and most eloquent portrayal. Even the faults of the work are those of the style. It is very easy to imagine the whole work as an outgrowth of the late nineteenth-century operatic tradition, with the same assumptions about the nobility of the hero, the clinging vine purity of the heroine, the handkerchief-wringing finale. I would allow this comparison to colour the reading of the work. Read in this way, the true greatness can be seen through a corrective prism, adding in an understanding of the distortions of their world-view and removing the distortions of the prevailing zeitgeist of our time. I
Rating:
Summary: Interesting but flawed early science-fantasy
Review: I tend to agree with the second reviewer! Hodgson's bizarre world is fascinating but he has a weak idea of plotting and no concept of character development. I found the ending to be manipulative and absurd but the atmosphere is superb, better, really, than Jack Vance's treatment of the same idea in the otherwise-wonderful collection "The Dying Earth". I would strongly recommend Hodgson's "The House on The Borderland" for aficionado's of the weird.
Rating:
Summary: amazing and exasperating
Review: In broad outline, this book is cartoonish and childish, it reminded me a lot of the Marvel comics I read when I was a kid in the sixties. But it's childishness is also its greatest strength, since Hodgson is the only author I know who can so potently conjure up the childhood terror of the dark. Some of the visible monsters and hazards that are described are almost laughably preposterous, but Hodgson never blinks and ended up convincing me to suspend my disbelief. One significant drawback is the meglomaniacal importance placed on the hero and his quest, it just doesn't quite ring true. A modern anology would be the Apollo 13 moon mission, I suppose, when millions of people were all thinking and worrying and hoping for the safe return of a handful of astronauts. So the phenomenon is not unprecedented, I just found that Hodgson treated it in an overly grandiose, facile and unconvincing way. I read the same edition as one of the other reviewers below, the Ballantine one, and the second volume was somewhat edited, according to the preface. A lot of the excess romantic stuff was deleted. Even so, there are many long passages that are well nigh unreadable, because they are so over-the-top cutesy and mushy. The faux 17th century writing style gets very wearing, as well, but it does succeed in significantly adding to the larger than life grandeur of the tale. It's a pity that Hodgson was killed in WWI, if he had lived to edit it, and clean up the style to make it more convincingly 17th century, the book would have benefited tremendously. And another of the endearing qualities of the story is that the landscape and basic story premise is very psychologically evocative of any person living a hopeless, dispirited existence. It really succeeds as a psychological allegory, in my opinion. Speaking of psychological things, Hodgson succeeds in describing many human emotions in a very tangible and palpable way. His description of telepathic "good vibrations" pre-dates the hippies by many decades. And he is also very good as evoking how one's emotional state can drastically alter one's life in a very marked, and even physical, way. He was a writer of rare insight and sensitivity, and the world suffered a great loss when he died so young and needlessly. It's been said in other places on the web, maybe not in these reviews here, that one of the most remarkable things about this book is that the tension is sustained for so long a time. I have to agree. One way that Hodgson does this is to adopt an almost journal-like structure for the story, each meal time in every day is covered, all along the quest. This keeps the focus of the story narrow and close down on the hero's level, so you never stop empathizing heavily with him. All in all, I would say, that if you are a fan of fantasy, then you should definitely give this a try, it's an amazingly original and engrossing fantasy.
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