The Graveyard Club by R. L. Stine and Carola Borelli
Boom! Studios (October 2025)
Reviewed by Joshua Gage
R.L. Stine, of Columbus, Ohio, is one of the best-selling children’s authors in history. His Goosebumps and Fear Street series have sold more than 400 million copies around the world and have been translated into 32 languages. He has had several TV series based on his work, and two feature films, The Goosebumps Movie (2015) and Goosebumps 2: Hunted Halloween (2018), starred Jack Black as R.L. Stine himself. Just Beyond is his first-ever series of graphic novels. Bob lives in New York City with his wife Jane, an editor and publisher. The Graveyard Club is his newest graphic novel.
Graves End is your average small town — other than the fact that it’s surrounded by cemeteries on all sides and the dead outnumber the living. There’s also the swarms of red-eyed bats that fill the sky every night, the mysterious disappearances, and the constant strange goings-on that residents refuse to talk about. But still, like any small town, teenagers find a way to liven things up, even in a dead-end town like Graves End.
Amongst the tombstones, Parker West and his small gang of high school misfits find the one place they fit in, and form a lifelong bond as The Graveyard Club. A little light mischief and gentle havoc, including keeping the corrupt town sheriff at bay, keep them entertained in their dull town, but their misadventures will lead The Graveyard Club to suddenly find themselves with bigger problems than just trying to survive senior year. With a plot involving a generational curse that permeates the whole town, The Graveyard Club is an engaging read with a healthy dose of monster lore thrown in for fun.
Carola Borelli was born and raised in southern Italy; she moved to Rome and obtained a degree in Architecture and a diploma in comics. She made her debut with Manfont (Yamazaki: 28 years old, Apocrypha) and soon began to collaborate with various Italian indie realities. In 2019 she began to collaborate with American realities as a comic artist for Space Between Entertainment (Destiny NY vol. 3, Vampire Emmy, Prison Witch) and later as an assistant on IDW (Star Trek). Since then she has worked as a comic artist and cover artist for various publishers. As the illustrator for The Graveyard Club, Borelli makes some interesting artistic choices. The art is a standard comic book fare, with colors used to enhance mood. However, when things get extreme for the teens, Borelli uses an intense anaglyph technique that distorts the page to a point of almost unrecognition. This technique is used carefully but adds a color layer of artistic creativity to enhance this text.
Overall, The Graveyard Club is a solid graphic novel. Fans of Stine, and they are legion, will want to snag up this newest tale from the horror master. For those unfamiliar with Stine or his storytelling, this graphic novel works as a standalone introduction to the master. It’s a solid story, carefully illustrated by Borelli, with a textbook Stine ending sure to satisfy any horror reader.
