Rating: 
Summary: An eerie classic of dark science fantasy
Review: Mr. Hodgson's THE NIGHT LANDS concerns the last remnant of mankind, alive on a darkened and terror-haunted Earth after the extinction of the sun. At the bottom of the trench of a dead sea, still kept warm by dying embers of geothermal heat, powered by the mysterious 'Earth Current' rises the Last Redoubt, a massive pyramid a mile or more in height, the fortress in which the final descendants of mankind survive. Around the Last Redoubt lurk massive and sinister beings, perhaps brought to Earth long ago by the unwise curiosity of man: but whether they are demons, or aliens, or extradimensional manifestations is unknown. The Northwest Watching Thing rises like a mountain near the redoubt, but history reports it has not moved in centuries. About its feet glide the Silent Ones, dimly seen by the light of the Giant's kilns, and in certain pits beyond the Silent House the shadows of the Great Gray Man are sometimes seen. In the Last Redoubt is born a hero who has the gi! ! ft of the Night-hearing, a type of telepathy. Dimly, he hears in his mind the voice of a human woman, and finds that there is another Redoubt somewhere lost in the darkness of the Night Lands, and he recognises her as his one true love from a previous cycle of incarnations. This Lesser Redoubt is besieged and dying. Alone, dressed in his armor and bearing his disk-shaped war-ax made of living metal, the champion goes for to find his love, despite all the unnamed terrors and mysteries of the Night Lands.The language in Mr. Hodgson's work if formal and archaic, hence will be found difficult or boring for some readers. There characters are mere viewpoints, without any personality whatever. The plot is so simple as to be nonexistent: the hero voyages across the eerie landscape, avoiding monstrous beings and hulking troglodytes, finds the girl, and returns. For me the main interest in the book was the depiction, all in hints and adumbration, of the supernatural entities ! ! looming, vast and inhuman, throughout the dead and wasted l! andscape: but since, during the second half of his odyssey, the hero returns by the same route he passed in the first half, no new spectacles are seen. Therefore the second half of this long book I found boring. Night Lands is memorable, strange, quaint and horrid, and conveys a lingering sense of cosmic inhumanity, but so flawed in its lack of plot and character, its affected prose, that this book may only appeal to devoted aficionados of strange fantasy.
Rating: 
Summary: Groundbreaking Fanstasy
Review: The Nightland is written in a near impossible 'classical' style. It should be a disaster as a book. It isn't. Written early 1900's its a breathtakingly visionary work that inspired the likes of HP Lovecraft. Persist reading it. It's worth it!
Rating:
Summary: best setting ever
Review: the setting in this book is the most powerful in horror. the perversity of mankind's survival, a bleak image of itself, after the sun has died. the description of the land without sun. the intensity in man's life, forever surronded by monsters in a surronding land man has no chance in ever getting back. nothing in horror has affected me more than these horrible descriptions. the morbidity of man's survival. a world without sun. how can you destroy such a story? well, Hodgson can. a love story described in the most stupid way, endless repitions. i walked for two hours. i ate a tablet. i walked again for two hours. ate another tablet. i slept. please. this could have been the best book ever. sigh
Rating:
Summary: The Human Thing after the end of time.
Review: This novel could be called " The Resolute Acceptance of Death" and it could also be called "The Resolute Denial of Death". For some reason Hodgson believes all of those debased faery tales. He believes romantic love conquers even death when, of course, considering how many people die every day, romantic love does no such thing.
The landscapes and the devil-deities depicted in this nightmare- world of the far future creep down into the nerves and light up all kinds of disturbing non-human lightnings. We are not merely talking about the destruction of the human race. We are not also talking about phantoms dredged up from the bottom of the human soul to spook us in the daylight. Jung and the approved psychologists have no place here. Something more grave is at stake - the confrontation of a bedraggled humanity with non-human forces that seek humanity's final destruction.
I have no sympathy for reviewers and readers who dislike the language - the style of prose Hodgson uses to tell the story. The language is the utterance of a subtle form of madness - the particular insanity of the Hero who tells the tale and lives it.
And the Hero is insane! It took me half of the way through the book for me to realize this. Everything about the Hero fulfills the dread shape of the male protagonist beloved to the old pulps and adventure stories in the early part of the century that has passed. He is occasionally brutal towards the woman he loved; that, combined with an extravagance of manly tenderness towards her tells me that the screws are a bit loose in his head - or too tight.
This book describes more of the human condition ( if I may drag that ponderous entity into this little review) than do a hundred thousand essays and novels and plays written by writers who adhere to the strict and ruthelessly exclusive artistic codes of "realism". The reason it does so is because Hodgson is something of a deranged mystic who ignores the rationlist strictures so many other writers of the day obeyed like slaves. I highly recommend this book to any reader yearning to repaint the landscape of her (or his) dreams. The colors will be vivid and aweful, but at least they will both provoke and endure.
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