THE NIGHT LAND by William Hope Hodgson

Narrated by Drew Ariana

Monstrous Meandering Through Unfathomable Obscurity

I have never come across a book of this sort. It is essentially a meandering account of one man’s quest to recover a lost love set in an incomprehensible future where the sun has been extinguished.  Told in a sing-song prose and using language evocative of Shakespeare it sounds like an epic poem. Personally I did not find this to be a successful attempt at relating a quasi-Science Fiction tale is the format of an Elizabethan love poem. The repetition of many terms takes on the quality of poetic meter at times but to me revealed the lack of imagination of the author in selecting more descriptive words.

The narrator, Drew Ariana, is well suited to this material. He has a quaint accent that is not quite English in character but resonates with the echoes of a past era and is the sole reason that I persevered until the end. In whole, this is a bizarre listening experience that I can find none else with which to compare.