New York Times bestselling author and comic book writer Christopher Golden joins the Capes and Tights Podcast for Episode 146 on January 10, 2024. To prepare for the conversation, we have compiled nine comics and books by Golden you should read.
Christopher Golden is the New York Times bestselling, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of such novels as Road of Bones, Ararat, Snowblind, and Red Hands. With Mike Mignola, he is the co-creator of the Outerverse comic book universe, including such series as Baltimore, Joe Golem: Occult Detective, and Lady Baltimore. As an editor, he has worked on the short story anthologies Seize the Night, Dark Cities, and The New Dead, among others, and he has also written and co-written comic books, video games, screenplays, and a network television pilot.
In 2015 he founded the popular Merrimack Valley Halloween Book Festival. He was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. His work has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award, the Eisner Award, and multiple Shirley Jackson Awards. For the Bram Stoker Awards, Golden has been nominated ten times in eight different categories, and won twice. His original novels have been published in more than fifteen languages in countries around the world.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Dark Horse)
Created by Joss Whedon. Written by Dan Brereton and Christopher Golden. Art by Joe Bennett and Rick Ketcham. The comic book adaption of the cult film starts the New Year off with a bang. Adapted from creator Joss Whedon’s original screenplay, witness Buffy’s humble beginnings as the Slayer! Follow her trials and tribulations as she comes to accept her destined role, and all the vampire slaying you can handle in a three-issue series. See the original Buffy before she set fire to the red-hot television show.
Road of Bones (Griffin)
Surrounded by barren trees in a snow-covered wilderness with a dim, dusky sky forever overhead, Siberia’s Kolyma Highway is 1200 miles of gravel packed permafrost within driving distance of the Arctic Circle. A narrow path where drivers face such challenging conditions as icy surfaces, limited visibility, and an average temperature of sixty degrees below zero, fatal car accidents are common.
But motorists are not the only victims of the highway. Known as the Road of Bones, it is a massive graveyard for the former Soviet Union’s gulag prisoners. Hundreds of thousands of people worked to death and left where their bodies fell, consumed by the frozen elements and plowed beneath the permafrost road.
Fascinated by the history, documentary producer Felix “Teig” Teigland is in Russia to drive the highway, envisioning a new series capturing Life and Death on the Road of Bones with a ride to the town of Akhust, “the coldest place on Earth”, collecting ghost stories and local legends along the way. Only, when Teig and his team reach their destination, they find an abandoned town, save one catatonic nine-year-old girl―and a pack of predatory wolves, faster and smarter than any wild animals should be.
Pursued by the otherworldly beasts, Teig’s companions confront even more uncanny and inexplicable phenomena along the Road of Bones, as if the ghosts of Stalin’s victims were haunting them. It is a harrowing journey that will push Teig beyond endurance and force him to confront the sins of his past.
READ ROAD OF BONES | LISTEN TO ROAD OF BONES
Hellboy in Love (Dark Horse)
Ghosts, ghouls…girlfriends?
Love blooms between Hellboy and archaeologist Anastasia Bransfield—when they aren’t busy chasing goblins through the UK, fighting shadow ghosts in Turkey, and investigating archeological dig sites in India, that is!
Hellboy creator Mike Mignola is joined by co-writer Christopher Golden and artist Matt Smith, featuring the colors of Chris O’Halloran, for a story of occult adventure and unlikely romance.
This volume collects three stories of Hellboy and Anastasia’s misadventures, plus bonus material!
Ararat (St. Martin’s Griffin)
New York Times bestselling author Christopher Golden’s Ararat is a supernatural thriller about a mountain adventure that quickly turns into a horrific nightmare.
Ararat is the heart-pounding tale of an adventure that goes wrong…on a biblical scale. When an earthquake reveals a secret cave hidden inside Mount Ararat in Turkey, a daring newly engaged couple are determined to be the first ones inside…and what they discover will change everything.
The cave is actually a buried ancient ship that many quickly come to believe is Noah’s Ark. When a team of scholars, archaeologists, and filmmakers make it inside the ark, they discover an elaborate coffin in its recesses. Inside the coffin they find something hideous. Shock and fear turn to horror when a massive blizzard blows in, trapping them thousands of meters up the side of a remote mountain. All they can do is pray for safety. But something wicked is listening to their prayers…and it wants to answer.
READ ARARAT | LISTEN TO ARARAT
Baltimore (Dark Horse)
After a devastating plague ends World War I, Europe is suddenly flooded with vampires. Lord Henry Baltimore, a soldier determined to wipe out the monsters, fights his way through bloody battlefields, ruined plague ships, exploding zeppelins, submarine graveyards, and much more on the hunt for the creature who’s become his obsession.
All Hallows (St. Martin’s Griffin)
It’s Halloween night, 1984, in Coventry, Massachusetts, and two families are unraveling. Up and down the street, secrets are being revealed, and all the while, mixed in with the trick-or-treaters of all ages, four children who do not belong are walking door to door, merging with the kids of Parmenter Road. Children in vintage costumes with faded, eerie makeup. They seem terrified, and beg the neighborhood kids to hide them away, to keep them safe from The Cunning Man.
There’s a small clearing in the woods now that was never there before, and a blackthorn tree that doesn’t belong at all. These odd children claim that The Cunning Man is coming for them…and they want the local kids to protect them. But with families falling apart and the neighborhood splintered by bitterness, who will save the children of Parmenter Road?
All Hallows. The one night when everything is a mask…
READ ALL HALLOWS | LISTEN TO ALL HALLOWS
Angel (Dark Horse)
Set during seasons one and two of the Angel television series, favorite characters appear – Cordelia, Doyle, Wes, Gunn – as the investigations of LA’s vampire detective agency delve into all that is dark, grotesque, strange, and unexplainable. Angel faces demonic rats, bizarre deaths from spontaneous combustion, Hollywood demons encountered courtesy of Cordelia, angry spirits, zombies, and more! Before you take a look at the upcoming new Dark Horse Angel comic series and the aftermath of Buffy Season Eight, take a step back and remember Angel’s LA saga!
The House of Last Resort (St. Martin’s Press)
Across Italy there are many half-empty towns, nearly abandoned by those who migrate to the coast or to cities. The beautiful, crumbling hilltop town of Becchina is among them, but its mayor has taken drastic measures to rebuild―selling abandoned homes to anyone in the world for a single Euro, as long as the buyer promises to live there for at least five years.
It’s a no-brainer for American couple Tommy and Kate Puglisi. Both work remotely, and Becchina is the home of Tommy’s grandparents, his closest living relatives. It feels like a romantic adventure, an opportunity the young couple would be crazy not to seize. But from the moment they move in, they both feel a shadow has fallen on them. Tommy’s grandmother is furious, even a little frightened, when she realizes which house they’ve bought.
There are rooms in an annex at the back of the house that they didn’t know were there. The place makes strange noises at night, locked doors are suddenly open, and when they go to a family gathering, they’re certain people are whispering about them, and about their house, which one neighbor refers to as The House of Last Resort. Soon, they learn that the home was owned for generations by the Church, but the real secret, and the true dread, is unlocked when they finally learn what the priests were doing in this house for all those long years…and how many people died in the strange chapel inside. While down in the catacombs beneath Becchina…something stirs.
THE HOUSE OF LAST RESORTS RELEASE JANUARY 30, 2024
Mortal Terror (Dark Horse)
A vampire-flipped Dracula in which mortality means life… and life means death. Vampires Jonathan Harker, Lucy Westenra, and Mina Murray live in underground London, trying to keep the undead city safe from the rumored mortals above who seek to give them life, only to kill them. But when the authorities refuse to believe mortals, let alone the mysterious Count Dracula, are anything more than myth, they are on their own to keep their city eternally dead.
