Back when I was oh, about eight or nine or ten (and then eleven and twelve), the kids on my street and I would spend our summer holidays playing all sorts of games and issuing all sorts of challenges to each other.
Board games of Clue. Hide and Seek. Cops and Robbers. Slingshot wars. And anxious trips to the local forest in an attempt to locate Dead Man’s Cliff. (A man had actually died there, we were told, his angry spirit, still present.)
Fun…and spooky…times, indeed!
Perhaps it’s strange, or perhaps it’s natural, but our collective interest in the darker side of the human experience grew in lockstep with our age. Still, we were children, after all, and although we might not have had ready access to truly haunted places or the parental freedom to leave our homes for long periods of time (or at all), we brought the fright…to ourselves!
In the basements of each other’s homes, we’d often dress up the surroundings to mimic creepy houses. The windows would be stuffed with pillows to block out daylight. To imitate cobwebs, Mom’s cotton baton squares would be carefully pulled and strategically hung under tables and across furniture which we’d then crawl across and under. And blankets would be laid on the cold ground of closets, cellars and sub-level storage areas.
We’d spend our summer afternoons in those places with flashlights in hand, sharing scary, made-up (or were they?) stories of the murderer who lived in anonymity at the end of the street; the long-dead bodies buried in the weed-covered hills just beyond our homes; and the grinning, sharp-toothed phantoms who had been visiting each of us, late at night.
And then we’d challenge each other, in turns, to create an even scarier experience the next day. Which brings us to the hardcover graphic novel, Creeping, released today!
Written by Zach Keller (Death Head, Meet Me At The Falls) from a story by Mike Richardson (Echoes, Cloaked, 47 Ronin) and wonderfully (and terrifyingly) illustrated Doug Wheatley (AVP: Thicker Than Blood, Star Wars: Dark Times), Creeping brings those fun and scary childhood events firmly into the twenty-first century.
Creeping is taking the world by storm! As a new internet challenge, participants spend the night at a frightening location, upping the ante each time…all for social media credit! But what is the most terrifying place of all?
How about an abandoned medieval fortress turned insane asylum.
Beyond the forests, the morgues and the crypts, there are real places on this earth where true horror exists and thrives. And its inhabitants don’t cannot bear the living. The fame-seeking participants of this Creeping challenge are about to find out that they’ve bitten off much more than they can stomach – and are now shockingly in the game just to survive!
Reminisce your own childhood horror-fun while adding to your own social media credit. Make the run to your local comic book shop or better bookstore today and pick up the hardcover graphic novel Creeping!
You can catch a sneak preview of Creeping here.