Author Joe Hill is probably feeling a tad bit focused on the world of television at the moment—his horror bestseller NOS4A2, about a vampire who owns a car, having just been turned into a new series by AMC. But it’s an undeniable truth that one of Hill’s first loves in the publishing industry was comics, and it’s to comics that the Locke & Key writer has returned today, with DC announcing that it’s partnering with him on a new “pop-up” line of horror-themed books.
The announcement of Hill House Books comes just a few days after DC announced a major overhaul of its various lines, including the news that the famed Vertigo imprint of adult-aimed books—many of them from the horror genre—would be shelved in favor of age-based dividing lines with names like DC Black Label. Per Entertainment Weekly, Hill House will apparently operate outside those distinctions, and will have several limited titles to its name in its initial run: Basketful Of Heads (magical axe makes heads you cut off with it tell you their life stories), Plunge (bad things happen at an Arctic research station, a la The Thing), Sea Dogs (a back-up story running in the other issues, about American werewolves fighting the British navy during the Revolutionary War) and several others. Some of these (including Basketful) will be written by Hill, while others will simply operate in his general sort of it-sounds-dopey-but-when-you-read-it-it-works wheelhouse, often with old Vertigo writers and artists (including Sandman’s Kelley Jones and Lucifer’s Mike Carey and Peter Gross) contributing to the work.
Hill House Books launches its first title this October.