William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918) was a British author, sailor, and soldier. The years he spent at sea in his youth steep his maritime horror, and he also wrote a series featuring the occult detective Carnacki. Yet it is two novels that have kept his name alive: The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912).
The House on the Borderland takes the form of a journal kept by a recluse in an ancient, circular house in remote Ireland. Pig-faced creatures crawl from a nearby pit and lay siege to the dwelling, while the narrator beholds cosmic vistas in waves of green light. Time then races out of all measure: the sun and moon dwindle to flickers, he and his dog crumble to dust, and the vision carries on to the death of the solar system. The Night Land is set in a far future where the sun has gone out. The survivors of humanity shelter in the Last Redoubt, a vast metal pyramid nearly thirteen kilometres high, enduring the pressure of the Watchers and the Abhuman that ring the fortress in unending darkness.
Lovecraft did not read Hodgson until 1934, but he gave him a full section in Supernatural Horror in Literature and called The Night Land "one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written." His image of a human refuge besieged by limitless darkness and unknowable beings became a template that weird fiction would return to again and again. Hodgson was killed by an artillery shell at the Fourth Battle of Ypres in April 1918, aged forty.