The Best Graphic Novels by Speculative Fiction Authors

Joe Hill’s writing is much like his father’s (Stephen King), so of course, I’m a fan. The fact that he also writes comics doesn’t hurt. At this point, I think he actually has more comics under his belt than full-on novels and short story collections. In fact, he even launched a horror imprint —Hill House Comics — with DC Comics in 2019. But the graphic novel that haunts me the most is the 2012 book The Cape, adapted by Ciaramella from one of Hill’s short stories. In it, an 8-year-old boy who’s suffered some hard knocks in life once used an old blanket as a superhero cape. When he unearths the cape as a self-pitying adult and realizes it allows him to fly, he eschews the superhero route, instead seeking vengeance on everyone who ever wronged him.

LaValle is another novelist whose books I automatically purchase no matter what the hell they’re about. And his comic series are just as good. His most recent series is the post-apocalyptic Eve, but Victor LaValle’s Destroyer — his modern take on the tale of Frankenstein’s monster —remains my fave. In this limited series, we’re introduced to Frankenstein’s last descendant, a mad scientist herself, and someone who will go to extreme lengths in order to reconnect with the son she lost.

I feel like I’m cheating here, as Gay is known best for her cultural criticism and literary fiction. But she did write the Amazon Original Graceful Burdens, which skews speculative, and this graphic novel she created with Tracy Lynne Oliver is speculative AF. As with The Cape, this graphic novel was adapted from Gay’s short story of the same name. In it, she reveals a universe in which the world has been bathed in darkness as the result of a tragic event in which a man flew an air machine into the sun, turning the world dark. The darkness persists for years, and members of the community begin to turn their resentment and hate toward the family he left behind. The fabulist story that follows is one of guilt, persecution, class, and survival…but also of love and hope.

I actually first became familiar with Liu’s work through her comics. I picked up issue #1 of her long-running comic series Monstress at my very first Comic Con and had her sign it. But it turns out she’s also the author of at least 19 novels (it’s hard to keep track), many of them in the realm of urban fantasy and paranormal romance. Anyway. Comics fans might know her best for Monstress, but I more recently enjoyed The Night Eaters, a graphic novel about a pair of Chinese American twins struggling to keep their restaurant afloat. Their mother worries she’s coddled her kids too much, leaving them incapable of finding success on their own. So she forces them to clean up the run-down house next door, where they find a whole lot more than your run-of-the-mill mess. Book 2 in this trilogy just recently came out, and I can’t wait to read it.

I didn’t even know about speculative fiction as a genre label until I read Her Body and Other Parties, and Machado introduced me to speculative memoir as well. So, I’m thrilled to be able to include her on this list. At the beginning of this limited comic series, we’re introduced to two friends and their hometown of Shudder-To-Think, Pennsylvania, a former mining town where strange and unexplainable occurrences go unexplored. But when El and Octavia wake up in the movie theater with no memory of the past two hours, things come to a head. El wants to know more. Octavia wants to forget it ever happened. This push and pull is at the heart of what’s wrong in their small Pennsylvania town.

I recently spotted this one at my LCS whilst picking up items from my pull list and felt compelled to add it to my pile. A graphic novel from a popular contemporary horror novelist? Sign me up! This is apparently Jones’s comics debut, and he starts strong with a story about a group of apocalypse-era Indigenous outcasts who discover a cave that allows them to travel back in time. Naturally, they decide to use it to save the world, and to do that, they figure they need to start where all the trouble began: the “discovery” of America.

I saw this one sitting right to Earthdivers and immediately recognized it as a graphic adaptation of a horror-suspense mashup that had come out the year before. Obviously, I added it to my tab. Somehow, I was even more engaged by the graphic novel than I was by the original. In this book, a group of young adults enters a hide-and-seek competition that takes place in a shuttered amusement park. All of the competitors are vying for a sizable cash reward, but they soon realize the stakes are higher than they thought.