I just finished reading William Hope Hodgson's classic 1908 novel, "House on the Borderlands," a loan from my friend Les who read it a couple years ago and has been suggesting I read it for a long while. The massive influence it had on H.P. Lovecraft is obvious even without the quote from Lovecraft on the back of the book, and it would probably be interesting enough to read just for that alone, but it's also a really, really effective book. With long, strange and unexplained trips through space and time (including a vision of the end of the planet and the burning out of the sun that reminded me of the tone of some of John W. Campbell's stuff), its interstitial between science fiction and supernatural horror in the typical early 20th century "weird fiction" manner. It's just beautiful in its ability to evoke both a "sense of wonder" and its incestuous cousin, a sense of horrifying dread, and a lot of stuff that's somewhere in between.

(Sensitive souls should be advised in advance that two dogs and a cat die in the course of the book. Also some humans and a number of semi-human monstrous creatures.)

I think its fascinating too that as late as 1908, you could get away with rural Ireland as the Distant, Uncharted Place Where Anything Can Happen, a la Africa in H. Rider Haggard's stuff or the future in classic sf.

Anyway, I have to love anything in which the hero (a scholarly-type in his 50s who, thank God, has stayed in reasonably good shape and keeps a rifle around the house) interrupts his search for subhuman creatures infiltrating the house to kill him to pour himself brandy, takes tea during lulls in assaults by the forces of evil and has a loyal dog that gets more "screen time" than any human other than the hero himself.