The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson

Overall, this part seems to have fallen victim to Corben & Revelstroke’s concept of what is truly important in the novel: the swine-creatures.Įven in this aspect, there is little resemblance to Hodgson’s novel. Most conspicuous is the section where the narrator’s mind travels across a plain of desolate loneliness into a valley of murderous gods in half-slumber. This is probably the weakest aspect of the book in that Corben and Revelstroke have excised large portions of the novel. I would have rather that they had spent more pages on the adaptation than indulge in this extraneous addition. This is both unnecessary and pointless and adds little to the overall impact of the book. Later, at the end, Corben and Revelstroke use the framing sequence as a way of not only lending credence to the events detailed in the journal but also for their own speculations and attempts to ‘explain’ the meaning of the novel. In it, two hikers discover the manuscript that forms Hodgson’s original novel while being chased by a group of irate Irishmen. Nowhere is this more evident than in the inclusion of a ‘framing sequence’ meant to give the story more of a “contemporary vein”. It takes WHH’s novel more as an inspiration than a literal script. If anything, I would not consider this to be an ‘adaptation’ in so much as it is a ‘re-interpretation’. Unfortunately, what was eventually published bore little resemblance to the original novel by WHH.

When I first heard of this book, I was quite excited! I’d been a fan of Corben’s work since his days in the old Warren magazines of Creepy and Eerie so I knew that, artistically, he would be a good match for the material.

Vertigo, an imprint of DC Comics, has a long and illustrious history as a publisher of horror and cutting edge comics. That is Vertigo Comics 2000 publication of The House on the Borderland adapted by Richard Corben and Simon Revelstroke. The amount of action in all of these would be perfect for such adaptations and far more so than Lovecraft has been, to my thinking.Īnd yet, to my knowledge, there has only been one comic format adaptation of Hodgson. Consider the sea creatures of WHH’s “Sargasso Sea” stories or the supernatural cases of Carnacki. It would seem that many of his stories would fit perfectly with such a visual medium. It is a source of constant amazement to me that more of William Hope Hodgson’s works have not been adapted into comic or graphic novel format.

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson