Clay McLeod Chapman joins the Capes and Tights Podcast for Episode 253 on November 5, 2025. To prepare for the conversation, we have compiled 15 books and comics by Chapman you should read.
Chapman is the author of novels What Kind of Mother, Ghost Eaters, Whisper Down the Lane, The Remaking, and miss corpus, story collections nothing untoward, commencement and rest area, as well as The Tribe middle grade series: Homeroom Headhunters, Camp Cannibal and Academic Assassins.
His new novel, Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, arrived on January 7, 2025. Recently he released projects such as the novelette Stay On The Line (Shortwave Books), the novella Kill Your Darling (Bad Hand Books), a short story collection Acquired Taste (Titan Books), and the creator-owned comic limited series Seance in the Asylum (Dark Horse). His young adult novel Shiny Happy People hit shelves on November 11, 2025.
In comics, Chapman is the writer of many Marvel comics as well as a number of creator-owned projects.
Ghost Eaters
Erin hasn’t been able to set a single boundary with her charismatic but reckless college ex-boyfriend, Silas. When he asks her to bail him out of rehab—again—she knows she needs to cut him off. But days after he gets out, Silas turns up dead of an overdose in their hometown of Richmond, Virginia, and Erin’s world falls apart.
Then a friend tells her about Ghost, a new drug that allows users to see the dead. Wanna get haunted? he asks. Grieving and desperate for closure with Silas, Erin agrees to a pill-popping “séance.” But the drug has unfathomable side effects—and once you take it, you can never go back.
It’s not wonder Ghost Eaters was said to be one of the best novels of 2022 (Vulture), as it is a visceral psychological horror with a deep supernatural twist which touches on grief, addiction, and the struggle with moving on. Great book for those looking for emotional weight along with the atmospheric horror. – CLICK HERE to read the entire review
Devil’s Reign: Villains for Hire (Marvel Comics)
As Mayor Wilson Fisk wages war on all super heroes, New York City is on a razor’s edge. There’s only one force fighting for the rule of law amidst the chaos: The Thunderbolts! But who are they? Fisk has laid out a proposition for the villains of the Marvel Universe: Join him or suffer the same fate as the heroes – or worse. But some who enlist are only interested in serving and protecting themselves! Where others see chaos and fear, they see opportunity – cash to be made and skulls to be cracked! Meanwhile, Moon Knight has been arrested and imprisoned in the high-tech Myrmidon! Now, surrounded by hostile guards and many of the very criminals he helped put away, Marc Spector must fight for his survival!
READ ON AMAZON
What Kind of Mother
After striking out on her own as a teen mom, Madi Price is forced to return to her hometown of Brandywine, Virginia, with her seventeen-year-old daughter. With nothing to her name, she scrapes together a living as a palm reader at the local farmers market.
It’s there that she connects with old high school flame Henry McCabe, now a reclusive local fisherman whose infant son, Skyler, went missing five years ago. Everyone in town is sure Skyler is dead, but when Madi reads Henry’s palm, she’s haunted by strange and disturbing visions that suggest otherwise. As she follows the thread of these visions, Madi discovers a terrifying nightmare waiting at the center of the labyrinth—and it’s coming for everyone she holds dear.
Lazaretto (BOOM! Studios)
It’s move-in day, and students from across the country converge on the campus of Yersin University to start the new school year. But after a looming pandemic strikes the college, a single dorm complex is quarantined with all of the students inside, and what first starts as youthful freedom from authority soon devolves into a violent new society.
Stay on the Line
After a small coastal town is devastated by a hurricane, the survivors gravitate toward a long out-of-service payphone in hopes of talking out their grief and saying goodbye to loved ones, only for it to begin ringing on its own. As more townspeople answer the call, friends and family believed to have been lost to the storm begin searching for a way back home.
Stay on the Line by Clay McLeod Chapman is hauntingly beautiful. The story explores themes of loss, but in such a unique way. Chapman is one talented writer and this novelette continues to prove he doesn’t need a ton of space to tell a gripping story. Stay on the Line is calling, will you pick up? – CLICK HERE to read the entire review
Seance in the Asylum (Dark Horse)
1865. The Civil War finally reaches its grueling end. Soldiers returning from the frontline come home broken, their minds shattered. An influx of patients overwhelms The Ashcroft Hospital, an asylum in upstate New York. Dr. John James Templeton is busy developing a radical new theory: spiritualism—the act of communicating with the dead—is its own form of therapy. What better way to draw out these mental maladies then with a little assistance from the other side? Templeton enlists Alicia Wilkinson, a medium who as a young girl established herself as a sought-after conduit capable of contacting the dead…but her own past continues to haunt her.
These séance sessions become a cutting-edge form of “spectral therapy,” where patients are permitted to converse with, perhaps expunge, their own maladies. By reaching out beyond the veil of our own world, these spirits aid in drawing out the illness of the patient. But something is changing in the patients. They are acting different…possessed, perhaps. Templeton’s experiment is a success. Too successful. It is up to Alicia to understand what is happening to the patients of Ashcroft…before it’s too late.
Seance in the Asylum definitely feels like a Clay McLeod Chapman story and partnering with artists such as Leonardo Marcello Grassi and Andrea Mutti to bring this series to life makes for a complete package. The dark tone is set in this first issue and we cannot wait to see where they take this tale of deception, madness, and mystery in future issues. – CLICK HERE to read the entire review of the first issue
Acquired Taste
A startling, witty and downright terrifying collection of 25 short stories from the “21st century’s Richard Matheson” (Richard Chizmar, Chasing the Boogeyman.) Perfect for fans of Paul Tremblay, Rachel Harrison and Eric LaRocca.
They’re feeding on you too.
A father returns from serving in Vietnam with a strange and terrifying addiction; a man removes something horrifying from his fireplace, and becomes desperate to return it; and a right-wing news channel has its hooks in people in more ways than one.
From department store Santas to ghost boyfriends and salamander-worshipping nuns; from the claustrophobia of the Covid-19 pandemic to small-town Chesapeake USA, Clay McLeod Chapman takes universal fears of parenthood, addiction and political divisions and makes them uniquely his own.
Packed full of humanity, humour and above all, relentless creeping dread, Acquired Taste is a timely descent into the mind of one of modern horror’s finest authors.
Origins (BOOM! Studios)
A thousand years after humans are killed off by artificial intelligence, one man is brought back to life — David Adams, who created the technology that destroyed his people. Now with the help of the android Chloe who revived him, David will try to restore humanity — and stop the AI overlords he created. David embarks on the greatest battle of his life, seeking redemption while also discovering if humanity can — or should — have any kind of future.
READ ON AMAZON
Whisper Down the Lane
Richard doesn’t have a past. For him, there is only the present: a new marriage, a first chance at fatherhood, and a quiet life as an art teacher in Virginia. Then the body of a ritualistically murdered rabbit appears on his school’s playground, along with a birthday card for him. But Richard hasn’t celebrated his birthday since he was known as Sean . . .
In the 1980s, Sean was five years old when his mother unwittingly led him to tell a lie about his teacher. When school administrators, cops, and therapists questioned him, he told another. And another. And another. Each was more outlandish than the last—and fueled a moral panic that engulfed the nation and destroyed the lives of everyone around him.
Now, thirty years later, someone is here to tell Richard that they know what Sean did. But who would even know that these two are one and the same? Whisper Down the Lane is a tense and compulsively readable exploration of a world primed by paranoia to believe the unbelievable.
Scream: Curse of Carnage (Marvel Comics)
Out of Absolute Carnage comes a new symbiotic sensation — and it’ll be a Scream! Patricia Robertson, Andi Benton, Donna Diego — their stories have all been leading to this. Now one of Venom’s original offspring — and quite possibly the strongest — stars at last in her own adventure! But in the wake of Carnage’s assault, what remains of the Scream symbiote? Who is its host? What are its intentions? And what will a pair of web-slinging wall-crawlers have to say about Scream’s presence in New York? Meanwhile, a darkness has formed in the waters surrounding the Big Apple — something evil that beckons Scream with a siren song! With Venom nowhere to be found, this is now her problem — but what is its connection to Knull, god of the symbiotes?
READ ON AMAZON
The Remaking
In the 1930s, Ella Louise and her daughter Jessica are dragged from their home at the outskirts of Pilot’s Creek, Virginia. Ella Louise is accused of witchcraft, and both are burned at the stake. Ella Louise’s burial site is never found, but the little girl has the most famous grave in the South: a steel-reinforced coffin surrounded by a fence of interconnected white crosses.
But if the mother was the witch, why was the little girl’s grave so tightly sealed?
This question fuels a legend told around a campfire in the 1950s by a man forever marked by his encounters with Jessica. Twenty years later, a boy at that campfire will cast Amber Pendleton as Jessica in a ’70s horror movie inspired by the ghost story. Amber’s experiences on the set and its ’90s remake will ripple through pop culture, ruining her life and career after she becomes the target of a witch hunt.
Now, Amber’s best chance to break the cycle of horror comes when a popular true-crime investigator tracks her down for an interview. But will this final act of storytelling redeem her—or will it bring the story full circle, ready to be told once again?
Self Storage
Chris Smith has eked by in life hocking the auctioned-off junk from those people who no longer pay the rent on their self storage units. He spends his days hopping from one storage facility to the next, bidding on units sight-unseen, only to sell whatever’s inside to antique dealers and pawn shops for as much money as he can squeeze. But Chris has never found anything like what’s waiting for him inside unit #83. Her name is Jessica. What if you found a zombie locked up in a self storage unit? Would you keep it?
GET ON AMAZON
Kill Your Darling
The body of Glenn Partridge’s 15-year-old son was discovered in a vacant lot nearly forty years ago. The police are still no closer to finding the murderer decades later.
Glenn refuses to let the memory of his son fade-or let anyone else within this small working-class community forget. His long-suffering wife signs him up for an amateur fiction-writing workshop at the local library, just to get him out of the house and out of his own head.
Rule number Write what you know-so Glenn decides to share his son’s story. The class offers him a chance to make sense of a senseless crime and find the fictional closure life never provided. But as Glenn’s story takes on a life of its own, someone from the past is compelled to come out of hiding before he reaches…
The End.
Wake Up and Open Your Eyes
Noah Fairchild has been losing his formerly polite Southern parents to far-right cable news for years, so when his mother leaves him a voicemail warning him that the “Great Reawakening” is here, he assumes it’s related to one of the many conspiracy theories she believes in. But when his own phone calls go unanswered, Noah makes the long drive from Brooklyn to Richmond, Virginia. There, he discovers his childhood home in shambles, a fridge full of spoiled food, and his parents locked in a terrifying trance-like state in front of the TV. Panicked, Noah attempts to snap them out of it and get medical help.
Then Noah’s mother brutally attacks him.
But Noah isn’t the only person to be attacked by a loved one. Families across the country are tearing each other apart-–literally-–as people succumb to a form of possession that gets worse the more time they spend watching particular channels, using certain apps, or visiting certain websites. In Noah’s Richmond-based family, only he and his young nephew Marcus are unaffected. Together, they must race back to the safe haven of Brooklyn–-but can they make it before they fall prey to the violent hordes?
Clay McLeod Chapman’s Wake Up and Open Your Eyes will kick-off next year as a must-read for fans for horror. This novel is a thought-provoking and emotional charge tale that will have you on edge long after you close the last page. It has a gripping, horrific and thrilling narrative with some pretty complex characters that deal with a chilling societal collapse. So, listen…wake up…open your eyes…and take in the terrifying novel by one of horror’s best authors. – CLICK HERE to read the entire review
Shiny Happy People
At sixteen, Kyra is still haunted by the horrors she saw growing up with her drug-addicted mother. She doesn’t feel like she belongs anywhere—and disturbing dreams come to her at night.
When a new party drug makes its way to her high school, Kyra’s life becomes an actual nightmare. A video challenge spreads among the students—and though she doesn’t participate, Kyra can’t escape the inexplicable side effects.
Everyone around her seems to be mysteriously changing, including the people she loves the most. Her brother has a new personality overnight. Her best friend suddenly feels like a stranger. The only other person who seems to notice the eeriness is Logan, the new boy at school. Like Kyra, he has steered clear of the party scene.
When the strangeness begins to feel sinister—or unnatural—Kyra is determined to find out exactly what is behind the mysterious drug. As she and Logan get closer to the truth, the line between Kyra’s past and present blurs . . . and she will need to face the terrors inside herself, or lose everyone she loves.
Shiny Happy People is intended for the young adult audience, those between the ages of 12 and 18, but it’s not just for teens. If you usually turn your nose up a YA novels, it’s time to check that bias and give this fantastic story a shot. Clay McLeod Chapman has written a genuinely terrifying book that could easily hook a new generation of horror fans for life. Shiny Happy People is hands down one of the best books I have read this year. – CLICK HERE to read the entire review
