Kalpas Of Eternity

A copy of this 1962 collectable publication of William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland (right) , first published in 1908, nearly a century ago, has found its way into my book collection. Hodgson is one of those authors hitherto forgotten a generation or two after his demise, who, if it weren't for mentionable praise in H.P. Lovecraft's landmark 1927 essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, would be forgotten by and large.

Lovecraft says this of The House on the Borderland:

"...perhaps the greatest of all Mr. Hodgson's works -- tells of a lonely and evilly regarded house in Ireland which forms a focus for hideous otherworld forces and sustains a siege by blasphemous hybrid anomalies from a hidden abyss below. The wanderings of the Narrator's spirit through limitless light-years of cosmic space and Kalpas of eternity, and its witnessing of the solar system's final destruction, constitute something almost unique in standard literature. And everywhere there is manifest the author's power to suggest vague, ambushed horrors in natural scenery. But for a few touches of commonplace sentimentality this book would be a classic of the first water."