Reviewer Praise for AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND
The Rolling like Sisyphus has given my work high praise indeed in what he says is the world’s shorted book review. I will quote the whole thing:
http://bbq22.wordpress.com/2014/04/25/the-worlds-shortest-book-review/
Just as with movies, I don’t review books much in this space, and by “much” I mean not at all. I think I sort of slammed Ulysses once in passing, but that’s about it.
Which is odd, since I am an avid reader still (though long train commutes do make reading a bit more practical).
That being said, VD’s Castalia House press has published quite possibly the most profound, interesting and all-around perfect book I’ve read in a long, long time.
And that book would be Awake in the Night Land by John C. Wright.
I was already a huge fan of Wright’s Golden Age books, so I had been looking forward to Awake… for a while now.
Through four beautifully written novellas that detail the final days of Man, Wright weaves an overarching tale of the human capacity for perseverance in a world where, frankly, humanity no longer belongs.
I’m not going to get into the details, because it honestly wouldn’t do the book justice. Awake in the Night Land is genuinely more than the sum of its prose, characters, ideas and plot.
If the last graph of The Last of All Suns doesn’t get you, chances are you have no soul at all.
My comment: It is my belief that my various readers who have no souls at all, be they golems, robots, vampires, or the Fungi from Yuggoth, should still buy the book in extravagant displays of extraordinary largesse.
And I just found a longer, but equally flattering review over at Didact’s Reach:
http://didactsreach.blogspot.com/2014/06/book-review-awake-in-night-land-by-john.html
Awake in the Night Land is without question a work of genius. Remarkably, these novellas are not actually original creations, in the strictest sense. They are actually homages to, and extensions of, the work of a writer whose name is quite obscure- William Hope Hodgson. In 1912, Hodgson published a work called The Night Land, which was simultaneously one of the best and most frustrating books ever released in the horror genre. It is an extremely dense and very long book, written in an almost impenetrable style of archaic English, with no dialogue whatsoever; and despite being written entirely in the first person, the protagonist is never once named. Indeed, it is precisely because the book is so difficult to read that Hodgson’s name is not more well-known; his contemporaries, who included perhaps the greatest horror writer of all time, H. P. Lovecraft himself, thought Hodgson was an unsurpassed talent.
The world of The Night Land is Earth, millions of years into the future, after some great (probably man-made) catastrophe has loosed damnation upon the world in the form of brooding, cyclopean horrors that dwell in the eternal twilight and darkness of a dying sun. The last remaining dregs of Mankind dwell inside a gigantic, 8-mile-high pyramid of metal, protected by a quasi-mystical field called the Earth Current. Beyond the Last Redoubt dwell towering horrors that crawl closer every year by fractions of an inch; and in the Night Land itself live ghastly creatures that seem to come from the very depths of Hell itself.
John C. Wright proceeded to insert himself into this world, in order to write four stories set in this post-apocalyptic gloom, as a homage to the writer that he reveres. The first story, “Awake in the Night”, concerns the dreams of a young man of his closest childhood friend in terrible pain and distress within the Night Land; seeking to retrieve his friend’s soul, he sets out across the Night Land to find his friend and bring his soul back to the shelter of the Last Redoubt. It is a tale of the bonds of lifelong friendship, and the tests that those bonds must face when confronted with the living horrors of a world in which Mankind barely survives. It is, without question, a brilliant tribute to the love story that was the original book, The Night Land.
Read the whole thing, or, better yet, read the book. Without question a work of wha..aa..at? I am surprised to the point of speechlessness at the quality of high praise these humble short stories have garnered. I suspect readers are assuming the genius of William Hope Hodgson is my own, and giving credit where it is not due. But, since I am speechless, perhaps were wiser to say no more.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
