I see we’ve boarded the Hindenburg and are well on our way to New Jersey. What happens after that is going to be for everyone on the ground to determine. But in the meantime, as we prepare ourselves for what may come, we at least have comics. I’ve gone on over and over before about my love of anthologies—their shorter stories, their showcasing of new talent, their ability to work well with themes—and the new series, Hello Darkness, from Boom Studios is no exception to that as the myriad creators here dig into various kinds of horror as though they were creating for a slightly less gory EC Comics.

In this first issue, we have seven stories to dive into—five short pieces and two longer works that will be serialized over the next few months in subsequent issues. The first story in the issue, “Contagious” by Jude Ellison S. Doyle, Letizia Cadonici, Alessandro Santoro, and Becca Carey, opens us on a small town and the children that have begun killing their parents. No one knows why the children do it, other than the need to do so is passed between them like a virus. To what end, we don’t know as the story leaves that aspect ambiguous, but we get a sense of the mood for this series overall with just this one piece. From there we have old men holding onto their glory days before becoming violent, surrogate limbs, a short story from the world of Something is Killing the Children, and a group of friends discussing world issues before their world ends.

Hello Darkness, from its first issue, does what I want to see in a strong anthology. But it also makes me realize something that’s been almost invisible in all my time reading these series. A lot of time, stories in anthologies like this are better because they’re together—they build on one another to create an encompassing mood. It takes a skilled organizer and editor to ensure these stories follow that thematic thread to maintain a cohesive whole. And while some stories are shorter and others will go on long after this first issue is over, they all play their crucial part in the collective. And while any one piece may stand on its own—these serialized stories may end up with their own volumes like many in the past—it’s their presence together to create an effectively creepy anthology that makes it such a good anthology to come back to every month.

As a horror anthology, Hello Darkness is what I’ve been waiting for after going through all the EC Archives at my library. And maybe we need horror stories right now to blunt the collective trauma we’re going to endure yet again. Sometimes these stories are what we need since they give us breathing room during everything else happening all at once. A good short story keeps you wanting to go onto the next one. 

Get excited. Hold onto each other.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.