Joe Hill's Rain Books in Order

Rain began as one of the four novellas in Strange Weather and later grew into its own graphic series. The premise is stark: on a bright summer day over Boulder, Colorado, black clouds roll in and instead of water they drop a storm of crystal needles sharp enough to slice through flesh. Thousands of people die in minutes, caught in the open under what looks, from a distance, like a glittering shower.

In the middle of it is Honeysuckle Speck, a young woman who had been looking forward to an ordinary milestone—moving in with her girlfriend, Yolanda. The storm wipes that future out in an instant. What follows isn’t just an apocalypse story; it’s also a road novel about grief, as Honeysuckle sets out on foot toward Denver to break the news to Yolanda’s father and find out what, if anything, is left of the wider world.

Along the way she walks through the weirdness that always grows in disaster’s wake: conspiracy theorists eager to blame anyone but themselves, small‑time cults convinced the glass rain is a sign from beyond, and everyday people trying to do the next right thing in circumstances that feel completely unreal. The weather keeps changing, and each new storm brings another hard lesson about how fragile the systems we rely on really are.

The comic adaptation, scripted by David M. Booher with art by Zoë Thorogood, translates that journey into stark, often beautiful visuals. The contrast between pastel skies and deadly crystal downpours gives the book a unique flavor, somewhere between end‑times horror and queer coming‑of‑age story. Honeysuckle’s relationships—with Yolanda, with their neighbors, with a prickly young boy who latches on to her—get as much attention as the spectacle.

Whether you meet Rain first on the page as prose or in panels, the core is the same: a personal story nested inside a global catastrophe. Hill uses the outlandish premise to talk about climate anxiety, human pettiness, and the small, stubborn kindnesses that survive even when the sky turns lethal.