Adapted from the William Hope Hodgson novel
by Richard Corben and Simon Revelstroke
DC/Vertigo, Hardcover
The year is 1952. The place--the West of Ireland. Two friends, bold young men recently kicked out of university at Oxford, decide to take a "cultural" walking tour of the Emerald Isle. One evening, after a rather unpleasant run-in with some locals at a pub in the hamlet of Kraighten, the two friends flee into the woods, only to come across something even more shocking and, ultimately, more terrifying. What they find are the ruins of a once-great house surrounded by tangled foliage, situated at the edge of a giant ravine into which pours a river of subterranean origin. Amidst the rubble of the house the friends come across a moldy old tome.
The book is a diary, a testament of the man who, nearly 150 years earlier, lived in the house that once stood there, overlooking what the locals called "The Pit." In the course of his writings the man describes the horrific events which occurred in what he calls "The House on the Borderland."
Within a short time of having resided there, accompanied only by his sister, Mary, and his faithful hound, Pepper, it became clear to the man that the house--and the pit below--were indeed a focus of some great evil which was clamoring to make its way into this world--assaulting the minds and bodies of those who lived there. Even the heavens themselves seemed to be infused with this evil, which seeps into the very souls of those who fall under its sickly light, producing incredible fears, unnatural thoughts and unspeakable horrors. And this is to say nothing of the horrific beasts that crawl from The Pit itself.
The man's grim tale leaves many questions unanswered, but one most important to those reading it--did the evil here crumble with the house, or is it just waiting for more souls upon which to prey?
As weird as weird can beThis comic, from DC's rich Vertigo line ("Suggested for Mature Readers"), is based pe Hodgson novel of the same name, originally published in 1908. The House on the Borderland was a weird and fantastical book back then, it's a weird and fantastical book now, and its comic book adaptation is no exception.
Richard Corben's art does a wonderful job of portraying the gut-wrenching horror to which the various characters are subjected in this story; the beings (human and bestial) and the spaces ("real" and "imagined") inhabiting this graphic novel are almost palpable, as is the fear and the evil which surround them. This most visceral, gothic tale has received a most visceral, gothic imagistic treatment. Lee Loughridge's colors convey the sickly and horrific hues this story projects well.
As good as the art is, however, the comic as a whole gets caught up by some of the narrative weirdness, quirkiness and unevenness (inherited from the original book) that can prove as much a distraction as an interesting facet of the tale. Simon Revelstroke's script, while it most certainly has its moments, unravels at the ends a bit and never quite seems to get on top of this story's many terribly strange, even trippy elements. Put simply, given all the story's dreams and visions and jumps in time, The House on the Borderland can sometimes be hard, even frustrating, to follow and to enjoy.
Much of the comic's text is Revelstroke's own words, which blend well with those of Hodgson's original work. A new framing story and some new and different psychological views into the mind of the man of the House (as well as into his sister's part in things) are additions to the original story. The extensive temporal and cosmological--that is, the "more" science fictional--elements (which are wonderfully fascinating) present in Hodgson's 1908 text but missing in the Vertigo adaptation are noticeable absences.
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