Nicolás Lepka

When I got this home from the library, I was surprised to see it is an adaptation of a novella from 1910: The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood. I try not to read adaptations before I read the original material, but I decided to break that rule this time as I couldn't see myself tracking down such an obscure, old story.

An uncle and nephew are taking a hunting trip into the wilderness of Ontario with two guides and an indigenous cook. When the moose prove scarce, they divide the party in two to try some new territories farther from their base camp. One guide seems scared of the area to which he is assigned to guide the nephew and begins to act weird and tells stories of the Wendigo legend that marks the land as forbidden. The art tells a pretty straightforward tale of interaction with a supernatural entity while the narration tries to make the encounter seem more surreal and uncertain. It's an odd juxtaposition.

And unfortunately, the narration is in desperate need of editing, with pronoun and point-of-view shifts I thought at first might be somehow intentional but concluded were not when they served no purpose. My conclusion was reinforced by the choppy and awkwardly phrased dialogue and the random nature of the punctuation. Adapter Nicolás Lepka is native to Argentina and his social media is mostly in Spanish, but his LinkedIn claims knowledge of English. As no translator is credited, he may have produced the English script on his own, but his editors have let him down when it comes to copy editing and proofreading.

I was so frustrated with this book, it actually made me want to read the original to see how far astray this adaptation has gone. The original novella is available for free on Project Gutenberg so I downloaded a PDF and am already a few pages in and it makes so much more sense so far. I recommend other readers check that out before venturing into this adaptation.… (meer)