The House on the Borderland

May 7, 2001
William Hope Hodgson's visionary 1908 novel The House on the Borderland
proves fertile ground for legendary underground comix artist Richard Corben. It's the haunting tale of an accursed mansion teetering metaphorically between hallucinatory human visions and the dark bottomless pit of the human subconscious. In Revelstroke's adaptation, two young backpackers discover a decaying manuscript among the ancient ruins of a manor house in the remote Irish countryside. They read aloud from the moldy tome, invoking the horrible story of Hodgson's fictional narrator, Byron Gault, who tells a harrowing tale of inexplicable evil and violent struggle against terrors. In the winding cellar corridors of the decrepit house, Gault, his sister and their dog fight off savage attacks by cloven-hoofed half-humans erupting from the depths of the mansion's foundations. Or do they? Hodgson's hair-raising story brings into question the very sanity and reliability of the narrator himself. The nearly 40 pages of mystical descriptions from the original novel (i.e., an exploding sun and the notion of traveling the breadth of the universe in an instant) are judiciously adapted to the graphic novel format. Corben's moody color and dramatically illustrated panel sequences make this eerie book potent reading and a captivating tribute to the original novel. There is an introduction by noted comics writer Alan Moore.