William Hope Hodgson's Night Lands Volume 2: Nightmares of the Fall [Paperback]

Those of you who have purchased and read the first installment in the "Night Lands" series of volumes collecting pastiches set in William Hope Hodgson's "The Night Land" setting will be familiar with the numerous problems plaguing that book, amply covered by someone else in a 3-star review of "Eternal Love".

This second volume avoids some of the problems of the first, such as typographical errors, which are now fewer (though not absent). The name of the author of each story and the story's title now appear at the top of each right-hand page, as they should--volume 1 had the editor's name at the top of each page, and you had to refer to the Table of Contents to determine which story you were reading. The stories have evidently been proofread this time, due to the vast reduction in glaring spelling and grammatical errors, but seemingly by the editor himself rather than a professional. His own stories (which make up roughly half of the volume) are rife with stylistic infelicities, bad grammar, run-on sentences with redundant word choices, and other artistic shortcomings. One gets the sense that if someone else were editing the volume, many of his stories wouldn't have made the cut. Hence, the book suffers from a lack of editorial objectivity that places it half into the realm of self-publishing.

The field of authors has been reduced to just three, and as has been mentioned, one of these is the editor himself. Presumably this was done because the best stories in "Eternal Love" were by these three. However, their stories appearing in this volume are definitely a cut below, except for perhaps Davidson's, as I admit to not being able to get that far before disgust led me to shelve the book, possibly forever.

John C. Wright's longish opening story wallows in painfully didactic philosophizing, often degenerating into rampant, unabashed sexism (a common criticism of Hodgson's own work, but even more evident in JCW's), and at the end into bald-faced metaphysical statements that do nothing to advance the plot or mood of the tale. One gets the sense of being lectured by a querulous, slightly crazed bachelor uncle who insists that you accept his (repugnant) worldview or be considered somehow less than fully human.

Andy W. Robertson (the editor and main contributor), whose stories were perhaps the strongest in volume 1, here descends into a strange double-pastiche of Hodgson combined with Cordwainer Smith, based on the theme of "spiritual eaters" shared by these two authors in portions of their (otherwise very different) oeuvres (for those who are interested, these are "The Night Land" of course by Hodgson, and "The Game of Rat and Dragon" by Smith/PMA Linebarger). He ends up doing justice to neither thread, and merely tangles disparate elements and catchwords from Smith's work into his somewhat cockeyed version of Hodgson's setting--jarring borrowed jargon abounds, ("hiering", "spieking", and Manshonyaggers from Smith), mixed with his own nonsensical invented words. Some of Robertson's stories also indulge in the same puerile male chauvinism as Hodgson's work, rather than taking the opportunity to break away from this unacceptable and rather dated perspective.

As mentioned above, Brett Davidson's contribution might be excellent; I'll add to this review later if I read it and find that he bucks the trend.

I really wanted to like this book, and although my expectations were relatively low after the first volume (decent stories, horrible editing), the reality fell well below even that undemanding standard. Unfortunately, the host of problems which marred "Eternal Love" have only partly been rectified in "Nightmares of the Fall". Add to this the declining quality of the tales themselves, and the $55 price tag for the hardcover ($35 for the softcover) begins to seem like highway robbery.

The only reason I am not giving this book only 1 star is that an effort has been made to match the binding and appearance of the book as a physical object to that of volume 1 (which was issued by a different publisher than volume 2). This was nicely done, and aside from the names of the imprints, they look like a matching set on the shelf. The binding of the hardcover seems fairly sturdy (these are Print-on-Demand books), something like a college textbook, and I have no complaints in that department.