Awake in the Night Land
Dec. 14th, 2014 06:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelliAwake in the Night Land by John C. Wright
This is a sequel by other hands, being based in the setting of William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land. However, I can assure you that it stands alone.
It consists of four stories, three set in the Last Redoubt, and a fourth set at a mysterious location that only slowly unfolds. The first three have their time given in a line up front -- which tells us, also, how many years they are before the extinction of mankind.
That is part of the setting. All take place after the sun and the moon were lost, and the sky so clouded to give not even starlight. The Last Redoubt is besieged by monsters. There are the abhumans, savages creatures once human; Night Hounds with teeth like sharks; the Watchers, enormous, glacially slow in motion, maliciously bent on the Redoubt; the hooded Silent Ones; and more ghastly and malicious nightmares.
Yet there are those who venture out into the Night Lands.
Tales of valor and love against that dark backdrop. They involve a prophecy fulfilled exactly, a pair of brothers arguing about whether something will lead to disaster, a man in a scene from two memories conflated, a backstory like Orpheus with a twist, a woman who is tempted at a dance to forget her brother, and much more.
This is a sequel by other hands, being based in the setting of William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land. However, I can assure you that it stands alone.
It consists of four stories, three set in the Last Redoubt, and a fourth set at a mysterious location that only slowly unfolds. The first three have their time given in a line up front -- which tells us, also, how many years they are before the extinction of mankind.
That is part of the setting. All take place after the sun and the moon were lost, and the sky so clouded to give not even starlight. The Last Redoubt is besieged by monsters. There are the abhumans, savages creatures once human; Night Hounds with teeth like sharks; the Watchers, enormous, glacially slow in motion, maliciously bent on the Redoubt; the hooded Silent Ones; and more ghastly and malicious nightmares.
Yet there are those who venture out into the Night Lands.
Tales of valor and love against that dark backdrop. They involve a prophecy fulfilled exactly, a pair of brothers arguing about whether something will lead to disaster, a man in a scene from two memories conflated, a backstory like Orpheus with a twist, a woman who is tempted at a dance to forget her brother, and much more.