{"id":26604,"date":"2022-10-03T13:23:35","date_gmt":"2022-10-03T13:23:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/?p=26604"},"modified":"2022-10-03T14:18:52","modified_gmt":"2022-10-03T14:18:52","slug":"the-house-on-the-borderland-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/2022\/10\/03\/the-house-on-the-borderland-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The House on the Borderland"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\" \"\"
\nBy Simon Revelstroke<\/strong>, Richard Corben<\/strong> & various (Vertigo)
\nISBN: 978-1-56389-545-6 (HB) 978-1-56389-860-8 (TPB) <\/p>\n

So, what\u2019s better, the book or the movie?<\/p>\n

This is a highly charged question with only one answer: \u201cIt depends\u201d.<\/p>\n

Adapting works from one medium to another is always contentious, and often ill-advised – but the only fair response has to be both highly personal and broadly irrelevant. Just because I don\u2019t like any X-Men<\/strong> films doesn\u2019t make them bad, just as my deep love and admiration for the works of Oliver Postgate & Peter Firmin doesn\u2019t make me six years old (no matter how much I\u2019d like it to be true!).<\/p>\n

The real issue is whether an adaptation treats the original fairly or callously exploits it – and make no mistake: 99.5 % of all reworkings are done with money in mind. Half of that other percent point is a genuine desire to proselytise: a mission to \u201cbring the original to the masses\u201d whilst the fractional remainder is an artist\u2019s desire to interpret something that moved them in their own arena of expertise: for years I yearned to adapt Hodgson\u2019s Carnacki the Ghost-Breaker<\/strong>\/Ghost-Finder<\/strong> short stories into graphic novel format. I\u2019m not dead yet and there might still be time unless someone more talented gets there first\u2026<\/p>\n

The author of those tales, as well as the source material for this excellent graphic novel from underground comix legends Simon Revelstroke & Richard Corben, is the brilliant William Hope Hodgson. Son of a poor parson, he was born in 1877, and took to sea at 14. In 1899 to make a living he turned to photography and writing. He was an early devote of physical culture (a bodybuilder) and patriot. Aged 40, he died in the Fourth Battle Ypres, sometime between the 17th<\/sup> and 19th<\/sup> of April 1918. Literature is the poorer for his premature departure.<\/p>\n

Hodgson\u2019s stories are dark and moody explorations of terrors internal and ghastly, against a backdrop of eternal, malignant forces beyond human comprehension ever waiting to take the incautious, unwary or overly-inquisitive. As Alan Moore describes in his Introduction here, Hodgson was the point-man for a new kind of story.<\/p>\n

The gothic ghost-story writers and high fantasists of Victorian publishing gave way as the century turned to such cosmic horrorists as HP Lovecraft, Robert Bloch and Clive Barker, but with such epics as The Night Land<\/strong> and The House on the Borderland<\/strong>, Hodgson lit the way. His too-brief catalogue of works stands as a beacon of pervasive unease and outright terror and why he\u2019s not a household name I simply can\u2019t fathom. His career was cut tragically short in the trenches, but unlike so many of them he faded into relative obscurity and never bloomed into posthumous posterity\u2026<\/p>\n

Rather than religiously translate his masterpiece, Revelstroke & Corben truncated and marginally updated the novel, concentrating on what can actually be visualised – so much of Hodgson\u2019s power comes from the ability to stir the subconscious brain – and in fairness, could be called a companion rather than adaptation of the original text.<\/p>\n

October, 1952 in the rural hamlet of Kraighten in the Republic of Ireland. Two English students on a walking tour accidentally provoke the locals and must flee for their lives. They are chased to a ramshackle, desolate ruin on the edge of a crumbling abyss, a misty ravine which harks back to a long-forgotten time.<\/p>\n

In the bracken they find an old journal. Scared and still hiding, they begin to read the words of Byron Gault, who in 1816 moved himself, his sister Mary and his faithful hound into the infamous but irresistibly inexpensive old house. Of horrors both physical and otherwise that attacked them and the incredible, infinity-spanning journey that resulted\u2026<\/p>\n

How this tale proceeds is a treat I\u2019ll save for your own consumption. This adaptation was nominated for Best Graphic Novel of the Year by the International Horror Guild in 2003. It is not, Can Not be the original book. So get both if you can, read both and revel in what makes each unique to their own form, rather than where they can conveniently overlap and coincide.
\n\u00a9 2000 Simon Revelstroke and Richard Corben. All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Simon Revelstroke, Richard Corben & various (Vertigo) ISBN: 978-1-56389-545-6 (HB) 978-1-56389-860-8 (TPB) So, what\u2019s better, the book or the movie? This is a highly charged question with only one answer: \u201cIt depends\u201d. Adapting works from one medium to another is always contentious, and often ill-advised – but the only fair response has to be … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The House on the Borderland”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[80,66,116],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adaptations","category-horror-stories","category-vertigo"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4AFj-6V6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26604"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26610,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26604\/revisions\/26610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}