The House on the Borderland

'A few minutes, it seemed, and I had risen above the great mountains – floating, alone, afar in the redness. At a tremendous distance below, the arena showed, dimly; with the mighty House looking no larger than a tiny spot of green. The Swine-thing was no longer visible.' In the damp and neglected heart of a ruin in the wilds of the west of Ireland, a manuscript is discovered entitled The House on the Borderland. Penned by an enigmatic Recluse, the contents spin an account of an uncanny and isolated existence, which unfolds into a hallucinatory and mind-wracking journey into cosmic revelations and encounters with beasts and beings without name. For the Recluse seems to have discovered another land and in it another House; a jade-green double of his own in a realm in which the bounds of reality are untethered. First published in 1908, this masterpiece of Horror and the uncanny was a direct influence on the imagination of H P Lovecraft and was described by Terry Pratchett as ‘the Big Bang in my private universe as a science fiction and fantasy reader and, later, writer’.