Transcript
Speaker: Hello book club listeners. This is your blanket spoiler warning. We will be spoiling the book House on the Borderland along with any of the other books we have discussed on this podcast. I saw the sun rise from behind the horizon. In a minute it seemed it had reached the top of the trees.
Speaker: Then, over the course of the chapter, the sun speeds up, quote, seeming to occupy no more than a second or two and hurling from east to west. Quicker and ever quicker ran the flicker of day and night. For the first time, I noticed that there were no marks in the dust of my footprints, between the chair and the window. But then, ages of years had passed since I had awakened, tens of thousands of years.
Speaker: end quote, time continues to accelerate and even the sun grows dimmer and dimmer. Then quote, so I watched through the fleeting ages lost in soul wearying thoughts and wonderings and possessed with a new weariness. Welcome to the book club podcast. Today we are discussing the house on the borderland by William Hope Hodgson. I'm Caroline and I find deep time, a time that is measured in millions of years,
Speaker: to be absolutely terrifying. I'm Carly, and I had no idea what to expect from this book. Once I let go of my rigid expectations for what a haunted house story should be, it was much more enjoyable experience.
Speaker: So now our summary. Two men on a fishing vacation in remote Western Ireland discover ruins and a buried journal, which they read. The author of the journal is an isolated old man who has lived for years in an ancient house accompanied by his sister, who serves as housekeeper and his dog, Pepper.
Speaker: The house is circular in form and its weird appearance includes peculiar decorations that suggest leaping flames. It has had an evil reputation for centuries and had been empty for many years when he purchased it. Late one night, as he's reading in his study, the light suddenly turns green and then red. Pepper hides under his chair and he sits still, frightened. The far side of the room becomes a vision of a vast, empty plane. He floats like a bubble into space.
Speaker: He reaches the world of the vast plain whose son is a wreath of red flame. He is brought to an arena, an immense green jade copy of his own house circled by mountains containing hundreds of huge idols of Hindu and Egyptian gods. As he nears the huge building, a huge swine creature is trying to get into the house. Several months after this vision, swine creatures attack the house from the nearby pit.
Speaker: that swine things are strong and intelligent, but ultimately unable to break in. After a night and a day in which the writer of the journal, the Recuit Loose, kills some of them, they disappear. His sister seems more frightened by his behavior in reinforcing the doors and shooting out windows than by the swine things. It's actually unclear that she ever sees them. A week later, he and Pepper, the dog, explore the pit that appears to be the source of the swine things.
Speaker: The pit is filled with water up to the edge of a tunnel. Some water flows down into the tunnel, which he goes down, and the struggle of waiting against it to get back out is exhausting and he nearly dies. Two weeks afterward, the pit has become a lake with that tunnel completely flooded, though there is something still bubbling. The man revisits a trapdoor in the cellar of the house, realizing that it opens to a bottomless abyss above a subterranean lake below his house.
Speaker: Asleep in his study later that day, he awakens into a place with a mist of light, and there he meets his lost love. She calls the place the Sea of Sleep and implores him to leave the evil house, but admits that they would never have met again had he been anywhere else.
Speaker: The journal starts again with the passage of time increasing in speed. Days and nights pass more and more quickly. The sun and moon become flickers and years blur. Pepper's body and then his own crumble into dust. Swine things take over the house before it falls into the pit below.
Speaker: The world fades, the sun dies, and the solar system ends and drifts towards an immense green star. He again meets his love at the Sea of Sleep, but she eventually dissolves and fades. He is brought again to the arena and into the Great Jade House. He sees that the damages caused by the attack of the Swine Things on his house have also appeared in this Jade version of the house.
Speaker: He again finds himself in his own study and finds that Pepper has decayed into dust.
Speaker: The proto -swine thing from the arena in his first vision attacks, inflicting a luminous fungal growth on his new dog. He feels compelled to open the door for it but stops, only due to a massive exertion of willpower. He realizes he also has a wound with the same fungal growth. He hears the creature coming through the trapdoor in the cellar, and the manuscript ends abruptly.
Speaker: The two men on the fishing expedition recover from reading the journal and return to fishing. An old villager remembers the evil house had once been occupied by an unsociable old man and his elderly sister until suddenly that man in the house disappeared into the chasm. The book concludes with a poem titled Grief. It is not clear who wrote it. It includes the lines, through the whole void of night I search, so dumbly crying out to thee, but thou are not.
Speaker: And so that leads us to our opening question, which is, what is the relationship between grief and the borderland? In my own experience, there's a relationship between grief and time. When I was grieving the death of someone, rather unexpectedly, I hated time. I felt like it was just dragging me further and further away from that person. And I also became very fixated on particular places
Speaker: where I had lived with that person or been with that person. Those places seem to have so much more value to me than they did before. But neither of those whites seem to apply here. Does the grief take you out of normal life and into the borderland?
Speaker: What is the borderland? I don't know. Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of similarities with previous books we've read. In the Hill House episode, we talked about, or I talked about how the loneliness of Eleanor made her susceptible to being haunted by the house. And your question in that episode was, is Hill House lonely?
Speaker: And I think there's something similar going on here with our he's called the recluse in some of the resources. So that are the author of the manuscript. And he you know, he says he never loved anyone other than his sister and his lost love. And he doesn't mention her until suddenly like he's telling the story of the vision of finding her. And it's introduced in in a way that
Speaker: So at that point in the story, it said that the manuscript was corrupted. It had been laying open and some pages got damaged. And so we don't get the full conversation between him and his lost love the first time he visits the sea of sleep. But part of that conversation is she's telling him, you must leave the house. And he says, if I was not at the house, I would not be able to see you.
Speaker: And he asked her if that's correct. And she says yes. And I've talked about an anchor before in different haunted houses, like what anchors someone to keep someone there.
Speaker: In this case, part of the anchor is that there's something going on at this borderland that allows him to spend time with his lost love, a woman he loved who died. And that's, he says explicitly, that's a reason for him staying here despite being attacked by monsters from a pit in another dimension, you know? And to be clear, unlike I think in other haunted house stories at this location,
Speaker: seems to entail more than just the house, is not haunted by her. By which I mean, she was never there in real life. Her ghost isn't at this place, right? A lot of the haunted house stories we read have meaning to someone or have terrible events happen because of what happened at that place previously. That's not the case here. It seemed that in life, she had never been to this house
Speaker: to the borderland and yet he can still connect with her there. Yeah, I think that's a really cool world building. There's not a clear physics lore to what's going on at the house. Right. And I really enjoy that ambiguity in this story. And there's a question of what does it mean to be happening in his head because it's these journeys to the arena
Speaker: across the planets to the sea of sleep. It's presented in the story as if he could be dreaming, but it is real experience. But the way that he comes in and out of these experiences, it's like he's falling asleep and then waking up. So like, there's not a clear cause and effect of his body moved to a different place, like time and place becomes fluid. Right.
Speaker: I liked what you said about this is very ambiguous in some ways, so I don't want to try to break down this story and just connect every single dot. I don't think that's part of it. It's supposed to be weird and overwhelming, but that being said, what you say about time and space becoming fluid is very interesting. Because Pepper does die, right? I mean, Pepper, the dog, is turned to dust. The swine creatures seem to be real. They leave effects. So it's not just visions.
Speaker: Maybe there's a parallel there with grief, but it's worst. Grief takes you out of life, right? It makes you're so focused either maybe on the past or at least on a person who's not available that you are not present, but it keeps moving on, right? Your dog can turn to dust while you're excited on your grief. And that sounds maybe a little too easy. That explains nothing about the doubling of the houses, like the Jade House that appears at the center of the arena.
Speaker: Not clear what that means. Yeah. OK. So trying to think of a productive way to organize our discussion here. There are distinct sections of the book. The attack, which there are a couple sections that I think of that are very adventure story -like. When the swine things are attacking the house and our author, our recluse, is defending the house and he's doing a pretty decent job as one person with one gun,
Speaker: and like defending the house so that was kind of fun like scary but a fun story of like his wits like finding the right spot to shoot from and like there's at one point the swine things are climbing up um a gutter of some kind and so he like cuts it off and knocks it off and or he knocks a stone off the roof and it smashes a bunch of them and then they they disappear completely like there's no
Speaker: there's no trace of the dead swine things left. So that was kind of fun. And also it was interesting in this story that at this time period, there were no phones, right? So like he and his sister are trapped in the house. And we've talked about being trapped in haunted houses before. And in this case,
Speaker: They're very physically trapped. There's a very physical and real danger outside the house. They can't send for help in any way because there's a fear of being attacked. So I thought that was an interesting twist. They chose to be trapped, right? They are recklessness. They wanted to be alone. They found this isolated home, you know, to live in. So they choose it too, right? Again, also our other haunted house stories.
Speaker: Yeah. And so that makes me wonder, like, what kind of person chooses that isolation he's described at the end of the book as being sort of a grouch? What's the word that you used? Unsociable. I do think it's a good idea to proceed through the book, but I do want to point out that he has one kind of short vision before the things attack for the first time. And that's the vision where he travels to the arena, he sees the Jade House,
Speaker: he sees a large swine thing, and then later it attacks. So I guess my question is, do they attack because he saw them? Was his visit causal? It's unclear. Yeah, and the way that First Vision is described, although I think that's true for all of the Visions, it's very passive. He is drawn through this
Speaker: space into this plane into this arena. He's turned about like it's not him controlling his own movements. I almost got the sense that was there some other kind of divine intelligence showing him these things purposefully? Or is it that he spent a lot of time in this house on the borderland and got tangled up in whatever other worlds
Speaker: are at this border right and by mistake he sort of fell into this border I don't know across the border I don't know how to say that it's not clear for the book but yeah he attracted the attention of these of the swine thing who sent hordes of other swine things
Speaker: Like the swine thing, when he first sees him in the arena, it's trying to get into the jade house. And we never know why. But the impression I got is that the house is some point of power or, you know, it was very war -like. Or entrance or exit. Yeah. And that it was territory that was valuable in a war sense. And so, yeah, did he attract the attention? There is that moment where he's floating
Speaker: you know, as you say, sort of passively being born through this vision. And this one thing turns and looks at him and then starts to run after him. Then he is sort of pulled back. But you're right, it is all very passive. And I agree that it seems like there's some sort of warmer intelligence taking him on this journey, although we don't get much insight into that. And so that really does make it seem more like this house is just a weird place and he got tangled up in it.
Speaker: like you said, unless it becomes difficult to attach a very specific analogy of, well, he just went too far into his grief and like an outcome that's tangled deliberately with too much that you shouldn't know. Because it is very passive, other than the fact that he chose this house and this way of life. Yeah, I think as we read these books, I'm more and more interested in like,
Speaker: There's, it seems like these characters are susceptible in a way. Like the characters in our haunted house stories are susceptible to being haunted. And our recluse is probably because of his lost love and his grief that it led him to make choices that made him a target for these weird energies or whatever we want to call it. Oh, that seems true. Something kind of related that
Speaker: struck me about this mirroring, you know, this, your house is mirrored in this other dramatic realm. I don't mean to be too simplistic or anything, but every house we've lived in or loved or, you know, has been important to us. It continues to live on in our subconscious and I don't know about you, but I often dream about versions of this house, right? Like it's not exactly the same house, but it continues on in me in a dramatic mirrored fashion. And that seems somewhat similar to the,
Speaker: Jane Greenhouse. I don't know exactly what to do with that, but that doubling of like your places you return to in your dreams. And they're often, for me at least, it's a variation of my childhood home, but it's always varied in specific ways in my dream. Cause that's the real, like psychologically, you know, the house I grew up in, it actually had, in my psychology, it had fences running aback, brick fences that you could walk along like
Speaker: out through the backyard. That wasn't true in reality, but that's very fixed. It also, in how I dream about it, it had a hill up front that you could run up. It didn't have a hill in real life. So I think places we live on take on their true nature in your memory of them or your dreams of them. And the mirroring seemed like that to me too.
Speaker: But I didn't mean to derail. You were talking about how in these haunted house stories, they have something that makes them susceptible. But going on your point about our psychology imbuing a house or a place with something, well, when we look at the reflection of the jade house, which is the reflection, it's surrounded by these mountains that's being watched by these sort of inert images of mythical gods. And some are identified and some are not.
Speaker: I want to tie that to the last vision of him, of our recluse experiencing time, eons and eons of time passing, the earth dies, it gets sucked in the sun, the sun dies, he finds a new sun. Like, I want to talk about that in more detail later. But he watches his house, his body decay, and the swine things come out of that out of the earth and tear it down before the earth gets sucked into the sun. It seemed to be a parallel there of his
Speaker: spirit because he says he watches his body decay so there's some other spirit that's that's still persisting and watching this happen. I want to compare that spirit to these inert gods watching the Jade House that like are these gods inert because they are dead? Yeah, if they're not dead at the moment he sees them, nothing else happens to them, right? We never hear again about these gods. They don't come late in later and play a part in the death of the universe or some establishment of a realm afterward. They
Speaker: you know, they disappear from the story just like anything else temporal, which is an interesting approach to God. Yeah. So it seemed like he became what those inner gods were. He didn't have any power over what was happening. He was just watching, although he was afraid of the swine things, even when he was just a spirit. And I found that curious that like he heard them coming up through the pit and he ran out of the house and escaped them and watched them destroy the house. In this vision, right? When he's just a spirit and still did that.
Speaker: And we also know that our opening to fishermen in the framing story, they visit the location and they see the pit. And so we see that the house is decayed. So we know that vision is not strictly a vision of this is the future of what's happening here in this place. It's slightly different. Yeah. Some of it did happen in real life by the time the story is told. Right. Real life. Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, there's another question here about what are the swine things? There is some emphasis given to they are quasi human, intelligent species, they stand up right. There's some description of them being humanoid. I've wondered briefly if they were humans distorted by maybe millennia of evolution, or humans who followed a different track of time, why that would make them so terrifying, I'm not sure, and why they seem to be so evil.
Speaker: also not sure. Well, I don't know if we could call them evil specifically. I mean, they're an invading army. And so if you consider an invading army evil, because they're trying to take what's yours, sure, they're evil. But are they supernaturally evil? You know, do they do they are they on the scale of good and evil in the universe? I don't know that we have that's fair. What you said about how he's afraid of them, even when he's a disembodied spirit,
Speaker: I took that, you know, something that can frighten your spirit and cause damage to your spirit to me is more supernatural, but you're right. There's not a description of good and evil in this book that is not a dichotomy that seems to matter here.
Speaker: Maybe we would call them corrupting. That was sort of the image I got with the fungal growths as well and why it's so important that they do not enter this world. If they enter it, they will corrupt it and change it. Yeah. I mean, if there was good and evil, we could say that the lost love represents good. She represents peace and warmth and home. But we can't quite. I mean, it's very clear how much he desires her and to spend time with her and how angry he is that he can't.
Speaker: But it's unclear if the time that they spend together is good. She's some kind of wraith, right? And they can only spend this time together in this strange borderland area. Right. What is he actually getting? Well, so she I mean, they can touch they're able to interact physically in the world. And I think in his last final vision where he travels to the green twin sun and then visits her again in the sea of sleep, it says that they spend a lot of time together just like talking and being together.
Speaker: But he's not quite the same, even though he's a spirit, he's not quite the same as her. He has to come back into his house. Yeah, he's not really allowed to be there for some reason. It's an interloper. Yeah, and it's my assumption is that if he lived out his life and died in a natural way, he would be able to join her somehow. But maybe not. I don't know this. I mean, I want that for him. I had the impression
Speaker: And part of this was because of the vision of just time going on and on forever, that it was really a permanent separation, which is so sad. You know, I said at the beginning that I find deep time to be terrifying. And that's true because you get these slivers of time in your life with the people you love or, you know, the good times, even if it's your whole life, it's a sliver of time compared to all of time. Yeah. I find that to be very overwhelming.
Speaker: So was this book scary to you? No, no. No, I mean, it was thrilling the battles and that part where he's exploring the tunnel where the swine things came out and he finds the pit and Pepper follows him down there. Like that was very thrilling, but not horrifying. The passage of time and the planets I do not find horrifying. It's definitely sad and lonely.
Speaker: I do find it horrifying. All those descriptions of time speeding up and leaving him just this consciousness, watching it, nothing lasting, no connection. I found it to be quite frightening and affecting. I read this book years and years ago, and those chapters where he has that vision have really stayed with me. It's so lonely that's part of it, but it's just such an indifferent
Speaker: world, right? And there's such a feeling of, for me, the good times they go so quickly and you want to hold on to them. And it's not like I have an unhappy life. I have a great life. That's why I feel this way. I know it's good. I want to hold on to it. So I do not want to be reminded that this is just a flicker compared to most of time, right? Because it's my time. Yeah. What about the swine things? Did you find them scary?
Speaker: But the descriptions were scary. Yeah, but it was a very, like, practical, like, you got to outsmart them, you know? And he seemed, yeah. And he seemed pretty capable. I mean, mostly my concern was for Pepper, the dog.
Speaker: And I really enjoyed, now that I think back on it, I really enjoyed how his relationship with his dog is illustrated in this story. You know he loves Pepper so much, but it is just a dog. And Pepper saves him. He's trying to climb out of the tunnel, and he loses his footing, and Pepper grabs him and saves him.
Speaker: And when he makes it out of there, and they're climbing up the cliff again, and he has to tie Pepper and pull Pepper up, and he almost gives up. And I was like, don't you dare give up on Pepper, like, and he does it, he gets Pepper home. And, and just like the sadness when he when Pepper, he finds Pepper has has disintegrated to dust. He really felt that again, that like, it was shocking. It's a shocking moment when that
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, after having survived being cut open by one of the swine things, and then he dissolves into dust, it shows that that art, unsociable narrator, he has a heart, right? He's not, he's not shriveled up and closed off, even though he is a bit weird with his sister, his relationship with his sister is weird, but he still has kindness and, and love with Pepper. And I thought that was really sweet and a really nice picture. Yeah, I think we should talk about his relationship with his sister a little bit.
Speaker: So they barely interact at all. I mean, he says he'll go days, spend days in his office without interacting with her. And then when he is fighting off the swine things, she keeps doing unreasonable things that wouldn't help. Like she goes to just open the door. She won't stay away from the windows. And she seems kind of frightened of him, which is interesting. Sort of makes you wonder.
Speaker: Yeah, because she's in the house, but she's not tangled up in this weird borderland experience the way he is. Yeah, and she doesn't turn to dust when he goes on his journey and comes back that we know. I really don't know what to make of it. I almost wonder, is she just there because he needs someone to do his laundry and cook his meals? The story kind of says that, yeah. I mean, he says he loves her, but it's a very assumed, like, of course she's my sister, I love her. Right, yeah, they don't interact at all.
Speaker: you know, sort of proving that even within this house, which is already isolated from everyone in the village, there's isolation even within it, right? He's pretty isolated from his sister. She provides someone that he has to protect. True, yeah, and he does emphasize that when he's defending the house. So I guess a related question, because he spends most of his time in his office or study, and that's where most of the important things happen. Does it matter that it's a house? Why is it a house?
Speaker: I mean, you could just have the pit in some cave that the swine things are coming in and out of.
Speaker: Right. Like in those early chapters, it felt more like a castle even. Like it has walls that can be defended and it has a big garden and it's sort of self -sufficient in a way. You know, they only need to go get supplies from town like once a month. It felt like a castle, especially being defendable like a castle. Like they can, the doors are very sturdy and, and keep those swine things out. It shapes like a circle and the arena is shaped like a circle. So that seems important. It has a shape.
Speaker: Somehow it looks like dancing flames, which certainly flames are a theme. You said earlier, and it's true, that we've talked a lot in these haunted house stories about people being susceptible. You know, they bring their susceptibilities with them and the house responds. I think some of that is true here, but I also wonder if a house, because people live in it and feel all of their feelings in it, if a house just sort of absorbs
Speaker: emotions and feelings and intentions of the people who live in it. And that's why houses have power and why it would be a house on borderland, not an office building or a cave that connects them or a tree, right? There's something about houses that resonate or come to store up the energy from
Speaker: the people who live in them that give them power? Yeah, well, with Abigail Lane, it seemed like the house was channeling whatever interdimensional activity was happening and that providing a space where people come in and they expect to be safe and separate.
Speaker: that it becomes pressure point, you know, when you think about a hose and turning it up all the way and like you block your finger on the hose and the water sprays out and the stream is stronger pressure. Like that's like the house is like that channel that just collects all that energy and like focuses it somehow. It just becomes so soaked with the essence of the people who are in it.
Speaker: uh, and their dreams and feelings and hopes. Yeah. And yeah. And human consciousness and human expectation on houses, not just the physical structure, but the human expectation of what that structure is for them also is part of it. So there's two things there. We talked about in Abigail Lane, houses are a focus of people's personality.
Speaker: and a projection of themselves in a very specific way. Like this house reflects my status and my dreams and how far I am along to achieving the American dream. And so there it's very bound up with the house particularly. But I think what we're also saying, particularly in reference to this book, is that sometimes people don't have particular thoughts about the house they live in. You know, they're not house proud or
Speaker: in any way really thinking about their house, but just the fact that they live in it, it becomes a focus point for their inner case and whatever that means and however it works. But those are different.
Speaker: Well, I think the location is really important too. Like this house is in Ireland and it gives the impression of an estate house and a big estate where you expect to have lots of servants and where business is conducted. It's different than an American suburban house, right? Like it happened although it's owned by a family, but there's more of a feeling that each generation is just sort of
Speaker: ephemeral, right? Like the house stands and represents the family over multiple generations. So each generation, it's not quite as connected to that particular house. It's more like the house represents the family as a whole, not the current homeowner.
Speaker: That's the impression I get from this house. And so it's different. I wonder if this is written in a time period where that type of home, that sort of estate and landed gentry, is that shifting. And I also got the impression that this is when science is becoming dominant. And again, with the inert gods, and then all of this time spent witnessing the movement of the stars is that
Speaker: about a shift from mythology and religion to valuing science. Like is there is this book about transitioning in society in that way in those two different two different ways from like, what does a home mean? And then also what does religion mean? That's interesting. And so maybe even that way of looking at things kind of destroys this type of house, which, as you say, is a reflection of the family and has
Speaker: value maybe is embodiment of tradition, something like that. One thing I was struck by is that they say this house has had an evil reputation for centuries. It was occupied for a while and it's now been unoccupied for decades and it's still standing, right? Like this house has outlasted many individuals, which, you know, to be honest, it's not something you get with the suburban home at all.
Speaker: So you're right, it is a very different image, very tradition heavy image of the home. And it falls into the abyss at the end. Yeah. I also think the fact that it is clearly an estate type of home is meant to emphasize how unnatural the isolation is. Because generally homes of that size would require extensive staff just to maintain, but also would have extensive staff because they would be set in a network of
Speaker: maybe agricultural production, or maybe it would just be the central community, a focal point for the community, and it'd have a lot of people around for that reason. But it being that type of house, it's even weirder that only two people occupied it. Absolutely.
Speaker: Well, so what you said makes me wonder, did our recluse? Did he accomplish something good by putting himself in a line of fire and then resulting in the house, you know, falling into the abyss? Like, did he close off a an entry point for beings from another plane to come and invade and corrupt our world? There are no
Speaker: swine things wander around the world at the end. You know, the fishermen don't run into them or anything. But there is something in the woods, like at the very beginning. That's true. That's right. They hear rustling. Yeah. And they're super creeped out. Yes. I mean, I think it's left a little open. Do they hear it because they're creeped out or is there something actually there? But you're right. Yeah. So does he do good in a way?
Speaker: It's an interesting question. I don't know. I really struggle with that because I guess it seemed like such a story of his own personal grief. And so it's hard for me to fit it in the framework of what did this actually accomplish for the world?
Speaker: Yeah, I don't think the author gives us anything about that. Because at the end, there's still people don't go in the woods that way. And there's still this alienation from the local townspeople and civilization, you know, as represented by our two fishermen. That's true.
Speaker: So how about this question? In the Haunting of Hill House, we talked about one of the opening lines is, no live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality. And when I think of absolute reality, I think of the interminable movement of the planets, right? That's something that is, it makes me as a human feel very small and powerless. And so, yeah, does the recluse
Speaker: He gets to experience that and maybe he doesn't see that as sort of a blessing or an opportunity of experiencing something that no one else has, but it is something unique that he experiences, that the movement of the planets and witnessing the decay of our solar system. I mean, to be clear, I would not experience that as a blessing either. It's terrifying.
Speaker: Uh, particularly cause it's not like he knew he would come back to the house eventually. Does our recluse experience absolute reality? And does that make him insane? Maybe. Uh, but I think if he experiences absolute reality, it's not necessarily the vision of deep time. Although I do agree that would be terrifying and drive someone mad. Maybe it's just the fact of losing someone you love. Like they are gone. Whatever you believe the rest of your life, you're not going to see them.
Speaker: at least if not more. I think there are things, you know, little shards of absolute reality like that just in regular life.
Speaker: I don't think you need a planted house. No, that's definitely true. I mean, I think with my own experience of grief, it felt like I had been living under illusion of, I don't know, of a, of a beneficent universe, you know, and I was like, Oh, no, it's not so much if this could happen. It's not a beneficent universe. Like it's just an awareness of
Speaker: things happen out of our control. And there's no defeating it, right? Like, like growing up, I love stories of good and evil and defeating evil. And and it's not that death is evil. It's part of life. But I never it took me years and years after losing someone to understand that death is part of life. Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure I'm there. I know the thought, but I'm not sure I have the degree of acceptance you seem to have.
Speaker: I mentioned it earlier, but for me, that first shocking experience of grief made me think about time for the first time ever. You know, I knew how to read a clock and whatever, but the fact that it is completely unidirectional. You cannot go back in any way and it will keep pushing you further away from that person you knew, the memories you had, the time of your life you spent together. And I remember
Speaker: Like the sharpest points of that for me was looking at the mementos I had from her, like a bracelet, a teakettle, photos, and just realizing that they were also gonna decay. Like a cheap little plastic bracelet, the colors fade, even nice bracelets. You know, they rust, they tarnish, the jewels pop out. Photos you really have to take care of. Or, you know, in 10 or 20 years, they'll be faded, they'll be lost, they'll get water damaged.
Speaker: the tea kettle, I left water in it once and started to rust. And that just really upset me. But that realization of even the things you think you can hold on to, you know, accepting that there is grief, like the mementos, or a house, for example, where you lived with that person and knew that person, it's not going to be there. Not only is not going to be there forever, it's not going to be there in the same way in five years, 10 years. Yeah. I think that's why I find this
Speaker: description of deep time so brutal because it talks about all of that. I mean the house he's in decays. The chair turns to dust. He hears the bookshelves break and splinter. He sees the garden. First it gets overgrown and then as the eons go on there's a different climate there. It turns to rocks. It turns to other things. I mean and there's not even a trace of it if enough time goes by. Yeah. No idea what any of this has to do with the swine things.
Speaker: or that battle and what that seems to mean, that's still a puzzle. Yeah. Well, should we talk about genre themes? Sure. So I thought it was kind of a funny twist. We have an elderly man and a woman living in the so -called haunted house. And in this case, it's a little different. It's not like a caretaker. It's not people outside of the story. They're in the story. But I still thought it was kind of interesting that we still have a man and a woman in the house taking care of it over many years. Yeah.
Speaker: That's true. Yeah, that's a good catch. Retelling the actual story, right? We have the frame story of the journal. I think we've had a couple of those, right? Certainly House on Abigail Lane had a lot of documentary evidence and here's someone's recounting and piecing it all together.
Speaker: So that's a theme, which makes a lot of sense for haunted houses because a house is a combination of perspectives of the people who live there. So I think for this genre in particular, that would be important. I thought he did an effective way of going back to them at the end of the story. I didn't like that in Turn of the Screw where we didn't go back to the original storytellers to learn their reaction to the story. But you liked it in this book because it kind of
Speaker: confirmed what had happened, right? Well, it kept with the tone too, right? Because the two fishermen, they accept the story is true and they are scared and they get the hell out there, right?
Speaker: Unlike trying to screw where these people are just telling jokes on Christmas Eve or something. So our main character becomes a ghost in the house. And again, that's kind of a twist. Instead of like in 99 Fear Street where our protagonist becomes a spirit and haunts the house and becomes the embodiment of evil in the house. I wanted to make the connection that when he's witnessing the house decay around him, that he's kind of like a ghost haunting the house. So that was my kind of stretch connection there.
Speaker: I like it. I like it. Something that I think of is very related to houses, but does not come up in haunted house stories. I hope this isn't too revealing, but it came up in this story was that sense of being under siege in the house. Like this is your protected what you retreat to. We actually haven't seen that before, other than maybe in the shining, they sort of retreated to their living area and hid from Jax.
Speaker: That had a little bit of that refuge quality, but this one had a lot more of it more correctly. I appreciated that. We also have the standard trope of the towns people know more about the house than either the protagonist or the fisherman. Both are kind of warned that this house has a terrible reputation for this location.
Speaker: Yeah. And so going back to the idea of like science versus religion, and I think there's also a connection there of knowledge passed down through tradition versus knowledge written in books and taught in a university, like the knowledge of the townspeople passed down person to person, story to story of like, that's a dangerous place and don't go there. I don't know. I feel like there's something there about
Speaker: sticking your foot into places where there's knowledge of things you shouldn't know about, right? Like it's beyond human comprehension and, and, you know, staying with your family, listening to ghost stories about the woods and never going into the woods feels safer, like the better choice than like pursuing knowledge for knowledge sake. Yeah, I really liked what you said about this house is a
Speaker: a transition point between sort of an age of tradition and maybe now an age of science. And maybe that's what the borderland is. It's a transition point. We talked about that when we talked about the house on Abigail Lane. There's a transition from sort of private suburban homes to now in an age of social media where privacy does not exist in the home or otherwise. And maybe it's that transition zone.
Speaker: where things become haunted and dangerous. And then there was, this is a little cheat as well. I noticed before his first vision, the recluse is going into his study and he turns on the light and it looks like there's blood all over the walls. I was like, what is it with blood? We have to have it, even though it's not real, it's just light that looks like blood. We have to have blood on the walls for our haunted house. It's true. We should come up with a list of like, at the end of this, a list of the rules.
Speaker: You know, the rules for mental crisis. Yeah. So do you want to share final thoughts? Yes. As I've mentioned, deep time is deeply unsettling to me. And so the way I'm going to deal with having had to think about that and talk about it today is how I normally deal with it, which is I go and I journal just a daily journal of what's happened in my life. And it makes it
Speaker: feel, well, I get to relive stuff that's already happened. You know, even if it's just happened today, it sort of deepens the experience and makes me remember it better. I'm, as mentioned, kind of terrified of the idea of not remembering the good times. So the way I deal with that is I go and journal about it. It's silly little things like jokes my husband and I have that, you know, in 20 years probably won't mean anything. You know, private jokes often don't.
Speaker: But I'll at least know that I valued it enough to write it down. I won't have this doubt that I let it go by and didn't appreciate it. And maybe it will mean something. Maybe I'll be able to understand the joke and laugh about it in 20 years. So I'm going to go to the journal to deal with my...
Speaker: I found some journals that are about 20 years old of my own and rereading them. And there was a feeling of like, I don't recognize this person, but also I want to be that person again a little bit. Like having recently gone back and read 20 year old journals. I'm really glad I did. I'll just say that. That's very encouraging. Yeah. I enjoy it even when I don't go back and reread them because it makes it feel that I remember things better and appreciate them more now.
Speaker: What about you? Any final thoughts? Yeah. So I'm stuck with the imagery of time passing. I'm not horrified by it or frightened by it, but it is it is sticking with me. This like when the way he describes the way that the sun moves and it moves so fast, it just becomes, you know, the way he perceives it differently because it's moving so quickly and the way the light shifts. And that did really stick with me. And I will say some of the descriptions of him like floating through space and observing
Speaker: the planets and stars moving. I found a little hard to stick with, but I remembered this part of a Madeline Langel book. It's in the Wrinkle in Time series where there's a big storm and one of the characters is really scared by the storm and on the radio is playing this classical music called The Planets.
Speaker: And I was like, oh, is this a classical music just in their home? But she had to turn it off because the music was too, and it felt like the planets and the storm was like raining down on her. And so I remembered that from Madeline Lingle. And I was like, what if I listened to the planets while I'm reading this? And I will say it helped a lot if anyone struggles
Speaker: with getting through those passages the way I did, having the music, the planets playing while I read did give it more drama and excitement than I was getting just from reading alone. I think I would find that to be overwhelming, but I'm glad it wasn't for you.
Speaker: Oh, and I'd like to share, we created a Spotify playlist and I'll share the link in the show notes because any mention of music in the books made me want to go listen to the music. So I started adding them to a playlist and then Caroline did too. So I'll share that for our listeners.
Speaker: Listeners, what did you think of The House on the Borderland? Do you enjoy cosmic horror? Does this book fit into the haunted house theme? Let us know by recording a voice memo and emailing openingquestionatgmail .com. You can also complete the feedback form on our website at bookclubpod .com. We will read your responses and play your voice memos on our feedback episode at the end of the season. And also please check out our Spotify playlist.
Speaker: Our next book discussion will be on The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Read with us. You can get your copy by using the affiliate link in our show notes. We'll release that episode next week. The Book Club podcast is produced by Carly Jackson and Carolyn Gorman. Music and audio editing by Alex Marcus. Thanks for listening.
