It's about some old articles entitled "Classics of Fantasy" that were published on the Wizards of the Coast book publishing hub site, back when that was a thing in, uh, 2003. Here's a cut from the piece about why I find these articles so interesting to revisit 20 years later:
Personal significance aside, I think the articles have a notable place in the history of Wizards of the Coast: they're from a period when Wizards harbored bold plans for the future of their publishing line, plans that ultimately fell through. With all the author interviews, craft discussion, and inside scoops into the industry, the articles from this period radiate a sense that WotC hoped to cultivate new authors. This makes sense: they were putting out calls for original fantasy fiction at the time and clearly aspired to be a "legitimate" publisher. They even published some original young adult fiction, though unfortunately I haven't been able to track down evidence they ever published independent fantasy fiction for adults. (On the Magic side too optimism reigned about the future of Magic's fiction--optimism that then head of Creative Brady Dommermuth would later tell us, after the cancellation of the entire novel line, was never backed up with solid sales numbers.)
Here's a preview:
Because I spend a lot of time alone and have spent a lot of my life alienated and isolated, I tend to think of archive diving and recovering the past in terms of individual enrichment. I almost forget sometimes that there might be an audience for this stuff, that anyone could possibly care. Sometimes though I connect another person to some aspect of their own relationships and history. Making some connection with a friend, and her family and history, and the history of this game that influenced so many of us, and so on, that's valuable insofar as our relationships with other people are valuable.
And sometimes it can be individually enriching in unexpected ways. Like, in reading over these articles again I made a very funny discovery: everyone has the same reaction I had to The Night Land, William Hope Hodgson's post-Eldritch Apocalypse epic. Specifically, a host of writers and editors down the ages have looked at this book and thought, "oh man this is [sucks teeth] this is almost so good, if I could just... tweak it a little bit...".
In fact, a lot of the article on The Night Land is devoted to a rather crabbish defense of Hodgson's weirder writing choices, choices leading to sentences like, "And some shall read and say this was not, and some shall dispute with them; but to them all I say naught, save "Read!" And having read that which I set down, then shall one and all have looked towards Eternity with me -- aye, unto its very portals. And so to my telling." Chewy stuff. Stuff that apparently even HP Lovecraft found a bit much, which seems to exasperate Rateliff to no end given Lovecraft's "own bizarre idiosyncratic vocabulary (including "eldritch," "squamous," and "rugose," to name only a few, occasionally with New England rural dialect and 18th century orthography thrown in)".
Moreover both Lovecraft and of all people CS Lewis criticize the story for its central narrative: a love story. The Night Land is the story of a couple of lovers (maybe from the Tudor era, Rateliff speculates), separated tragically by death, but granted the possibility of reunion in the protagonist's vision of a distant future. In that future, the sun has been snuffed and the land teams with all manner of horrors. It is, Rateliff succinctly suggests, a vision of the future only hinted at in Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, one where the Elder Gods plunge the world into nightmare. The last remnants of humanity huddle in two great pyramid redoubts. Our protagonist is reincarnated into one pyramid... and his lover is reincarnated into the other. When the other pyramid is breached by the horrors of the night, he has to brave the dark and its terrors to reach her.
I think this hook is electrifyingly brilliant. CS Lewis dismisses it as a "sentimental and irrelevant erotic interest". Well, can't please 'em all. Or any of them in fact. Everyone seems to have some complaint about the Night Land, and apparently editor and writer Lin Carter even published a version that cuts about a tenth of the book--mostly, romantic elements. Hodgson himself put together an excerpted novella--The Story of X--that purported to be fragments discovered of a lost longer narrative, a sort of Night Land The Abridged Series. And then there's all the people since who've written their own versions of The Night Land or short stories set in The Night Land. Heck, when I was part of the large scale fan project The Magic Expanded Multiverse, one of the other writers on the project created an entire dying world based on The Night Land. People are just drawn to this book like, well, abhumans to the last redoubt of humanity, I guess.
Which is all intensely funny to me because a few years back I did the same exact thing. I started reading The Night Land and the further in I got, the more convinced I became that if you could just, if you could just make it so every single paragraph didn't start with "And", so every verb wasn't constructed like "I not to have slept" and "the hour did be full come", so that it read a bit more like his other novels like the brilliant Boats of the Glenn Carrig... it could just be so good!
I did not last long on my epic quest to rewrite The Night Land. Most of that was because I was crashing out of Toronto with a chronic pain condition and a boatload of trauma, but I also just couldn't quite make the project work in my own head. Eventually I found myself coming back around to Rateliff's position: the archaic writing is there because that's how Hodgson wanted to tell the story; to strip it out is to simply produce a new work, and you might as well just... do that, and take or leave The Night Land as is.
Apparently, though, the temptation will always be there for each new generation of writers to rewrite The Night Land.