Charles Burns Books in Order

Young Tony Delmonte lives in an apparently ordinary American suburb. Sneaking out of his bedroom one night draws the impressionable boy into a disturbing mystery involving summer-camp murders and burials hidden in neighborhood backyards.

Burns and Gary Panter turn drawings of unsettling faces into an interactive book whose divided pages can be flipped independently. Readers combine eyes, mouths, and other features to create thousands of grotesque variations, mixing the two artists' distinctive visual worlds.

Masked private detective El Borbah takes cases in a city of suspicious clients, strange cults, and disturbing technological experiments. Five stories send the heavy-drinking investigator through a world where criminal schemes and scientific ambition produce increasingly grotesque threats.

Three graphic stories explore unsettling transformations and distorted attachments, from a televangelist's messianic following to a boy whose life changes after receiving a dog's heart. Burns combines romantic unease, bodily horror, and dark humor in encounters where intimacy becomes dangerous.

Burns pairs photographs of landscapes, bodies, food, and everyday objects to create unexpected visual relationships. Some images nearly merge while others clash, inviting viewers to examine how juxtaposition changes the meaning and emotional atmosphere of otherwise unrelated scenes.

Doug wakes to a strange sound and finds his long-dead cat beside a hole in the wall. Following it draws him into an unfamiliar world where fragmented memories and disturbing encounters undermine his ability to distinguish dreams from waking experience.

Doug struggles to reconstruct the incident that shattered his life, including memories of his girlfriend Sarah and her threatening former boyfriend. His search unfolds alongside a distorted alternate world, where his work supplying the Hive offers unsettling echoes of the past.

Doug's fragmented journey reaches its conclusion as the memories he has resisted begin to challenge his version of events. The disturbing alternate world and his waking life draw closer together, forcing him to confront the lie underlying his attempts to escape the past.

Drawings, photographs, imagined comic covers, and invented lettering extend the strange world of Burns's graphic trilogy. Created alongside the main books, these visual experiments offer further encounters with its unsettling imagery and the shifting boundary between a story and its creation.

Aspiring filmmaker Brian takes friends to a remote cabin to shoot a science-fiction horror movie. His unreturned attraction to Laurie fuels elaborate drawings and fantasies, blurring the boundaries between artistic expression, obsession, and the people participating in his project.