The House of Silence

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“‘The House of Silence’ was discovered a few years ago, fortuitously, after an inspired second reading of one of my own favourite horror novels: William Hope Hodgson’s ‘The House on the Borderland’. I had found a perfect incidental soundtrack for this indulgence, composed by the German dark ambient project ‘Nostalgia’. Soon after began a ‘Nostalgia’. Soon after began a binging upon all the works by Hodgson I collected for years but not yet fully ingested. I even, at long last, imbibed in full his massive, flawed and sentimental masterpiece, ‘The Night Land’. I found a deep, lingering charm in its quaint yet epic atmosphere—the almost hypnotising pseudo-archaisms, the unrelenting otherworldliness of its settings and inhabitants, the aura of its dark, almost childlike mystery and wonder. The dreamful flavours of that dense, blocky text persisted with me, as did the realisation that the famous house on the Borderland featured alike in ‘The Night Land’: it was the sinister House of Silence itself—the Borderland of Borderlands!” — Avalon Brantley