William Hope Hodgson's 1908 novel The House On The Borderland was both creative and imitative; it borrowed the tone and literary conventions of the Gothic literature movement (tangled forests, rotting ruins, and a lonely breast-beating diarist), but injected them with a grand cosmic outlook that carried its dreaming protagonist to the physical center of the universe and the temporal end of the solar system. DC's comic-book adaptation is, similarly, both creative and imitative; it borrows the text, tone, and rough plotline of the original book, but injects it with the graphic sex and violence it was missing the first time around. Where Hodgson's novel is a dry, drafty mood piece, half allegory and half speculative meandering, this new version is largely a muddy vehicle for nudity, gore, intimations of rape and incest, and a series of pitched battles involving oversexed pig-beasts and an insane, naked, gore-spattered cannibal. The contrast between the two versions is striking and grotesque: Where Hodgson hints at and alludes to unknown terrors, Simon Revelstroke and Richard Corben smear blood, brains, and mutilated corpses across their pages. Corben is an industry veteran who cut his teeth on science fiction, fantasy epics, and horror comics. His heavy-lined art is striking but disturbingly distorted, with his huge-lipped, lumpen characters sometimes appearing less human than his interpretations of Hodgson's pig-men. Revelstroke, Corben's longtime collaborator, assisted with the melodramatic scripting, which effectively echoes Hodgson and his biggest fan, H.P. Lovecraft. But Hodgson's attempts to suggest the unmitigated horror of temporal and physical infinity are not well served by the limited space of a quarter-page panel, any more than his grandiloquent waves of fanciful prose are served by word balloons. And neither his conceptual experimentation nor his thoughtful writing are especially improved by this messy, prurient modernization. Like so many cross-media adaptations, this one's only accomplishment may be in luring readers to the original book.