I cut my teeth on horror with Fear on Four. My stories of the dark were told to me by polite, urbane British not-quite men far past my bedtime on radio. My love for the genre, and for audio, was born there and both continue to this day.
Cullen Bunn came to the genre a little differently. Here’s the prolific horror comic writer on his path into the dark:
As a kid, I often went fishing at the creek with my old man. He had a nice fishing boat, lots of expensive rods and reels, and he often took the family out on ocean fishing excursions. But he still liked taking old fashioned cane poles out to the creek to fish for catfish. I went with him frequently. (One of his favorite fishing spots was near a country club, and we often squeezed through a break in the fence and crept across the golf course to get there.)
For some reason, I always took a big stack of horror comics with me to read on the muddy bank. House of Mystery, Ghosts, House of Secrets, Creepy, Eerie, Haunted Library, you name it. I never brought superhero books. Only horror tales seemed right while sitting in the eerie, early morning light.
I loved those anthologies so much. They absolutely played a big role in the writer I would become. Over the past couple of decades, I’ve written many short horror stories. Many of those prose stories were collected in the book A PASSAGE IN BLACK from OmahaBound. That book, if you haven’t read it yet, has some of my earliest work in it, but I wanted to showcase everything so readers could see who I am and where I came from.
And now—right here!—I’m announcing that my love of horror comic anthologies and my love of horror short fiction is coming together like peanut butter and jelly! This book will feature comic book adaptations of some of my short horror stories from the prose collection.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Cullen and colleague Fred Van Lente earlier this year and they’re both thoroughly charming and ridiculously talented. Pieces on Fred’s novel The Con Artist, and Cullen’s superlative horror series Harrow Country are both on the schedule.
But in the meantime, go take a look at this. A Passage in Black sees Cullen working with a group of artists to adapt some of the short stories from his anthology of the same name. It’s his horror comics, returned to life. It’s my horror stories, whispered into my eyes not my ears and it looks a ton of fun. The project is kickstarting for the next 12 days and there are some really good levels so go help get it over the line.