Whatever faults this book may possess, however inordinate its length may seem, it impresses the reader as being the ultimate saga of a perishing cosmos, the last epic of a world beleaguered by eternal night and by the unvisageable spawn of darkness.

Only a great poet could have conceived and written this story; and it is perhaps not illegitimate to wonder how much of actual prophecy may have been mingled with the poesy.When the book was written, the nature of the energy source that powers stars was not known: Lord Kelvin had published calculations based on the hypothesis that the energy came from the gravitational collapse of the gas cloud that had formed the sun and found that this mechanism gave the Sun a lifetime of only a few tens of million of years.

The language and style used are intended to resemble those of the 17th century, though the prose has features characteristic of no particular period, such as an almost complete lack of dialogue or proper names.

The last few millions of the human race are gathered together in the Last Redoubt, a gigantic metal pyramid, nearly 8 mi (13 km) high, which is under siege from unknown forces and Powers outside in the dark.

The abridged version of the novel was first published in the United States in 1912 in chapbook form as Poems and a Dream of X (New York: R. H. Paget, 1912), in an extremely limited print run.

The abridgement by itself was republished in a limited edition in 1977, with an introduction by Sam Moskowitz and color illustrations by Stephen Fabian, under the title The Dream of X (West Kingston, R.I.: Donald M. Grant, 1977).

The experimenters had attempted to open a gate into a universe of pure order, and the survivors find themselves trapped in a region of the Way that has transformed to a chaotic state resembling the Night Land.

Another work of Greg Bear's, City at the End of Time (2008), shares a number of plot elements with The Night Land and contains a specific reference to the Last Redoubt, giving William Hope Hodgson himself a cameo role in the story line.