Presentation first of The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson, £3200 at Lyon & Turnbull.
It had expectations of £2000-3000 at Lyon & Turnbull (26% buyer’s premium) in Edinburgh on October 2 and hammered at £3200.
As a horror-fantasy work and an early example of the ‘dying Earth’ genre, The Night Land made a strong impression on Hodgson’s contemporaries.
Presentation first of The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson, £3200 at Lyon & Turnbull.
In the 1970s, Clark Ashton-Smith analysed the novel, writing that “…it impresses the reader as being the ultimate saga of a perishing cosmos, the last epic of a world beleaguered by eternal night and by the unvisageable spawn of darkness. Only a great poet could have conceived and written this story.”
Hodgson was to suffer the same tragic fate of many of his contemporaries. He was killed at the Fourth Battle of Ypres in April 1918.
