The House on the Borderland (1908) by William Hope Hodgson

Of pigs and paratexts

Readers unfamiliar with The House on the Borderland may prefer to read these notes only after reading the novel.

William Hope Hodgson triple-bagged The House on the Borderland (1908) with three paratextual frames.

The first, the verse "To My Father," precedes the author's introduction signed by William Hope Hodgson himself; this is the poem that introduces the term "shoon", from Scottish dialect. Hence, footsteps -- and there many heard in this novel -- are metonymically rendered "shoon."

Of vanishing shoon—      

  Out in the night with the Dead.

The second frame, signed "WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON December 17, 1907," ends with a further stroke of distancing and familiar/unfamiliar uncanniness:

[....]  A small book it is; but thick, and all, save the last few pages, filled with a quaint but legible handwriting, and writ very close. I have the queer, faint, pit-water smell of it in my nostrils now as I write, and my fingers have subconscious memories of the soft, "cloggy" feel of the long-damp pa…