he 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 be
This comic, from DC's rich Vertigo line ("Suggested
for Mature Readers"), is based on the William Hope
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.
