Daniel Barnett handed us a doorstopper. Six volumes, one hardcover, and a horror epic that has been building since 2020. We sat down with him for an interview to talk about The Nightmareland Chronicles, the omnibus dropping September 1, and what it takes to hold twelve books straight in your head without writing most of it down.
What The Nightmareland Chronicles Is About
The pitch Barnett uses is one man’s journey to reach his estranged daughter in a world claimed by eternal night. He admits that tagline does not cover all of it. It is also a found family story, and the shorthand he reaches for is “The Dark Tower meets The Last of Us” (the games specifically, since he is a purist on that one).
The setup: the sun is gone, and it takes a while to unfold, but eventually places get populated by the nightmares people left behind. Literal manifestations. Barnett calls it “this big sandbox of horrors,” and he still insists it stays grounded, because the point is a small group of people crossing a darkened America.
We asked whether it leans horror or fantasy. He answered that the fantasy is structural. A group on a quest, the chosen children against the great evil, the same bones a lot of Stephen King’s work has.
There might be some fantasy bones in the house, but the architecture surrounding it is all horror.
John Hawthorne, the lead, belongs to the same archetype as Roland. He even has his own dark tower to reach, which turns out to be his daughter’s blue house by the Atlantic Ocean. Arthur was sold immediately:
I love The Dark Tower. I read all of it, and I completely devoured it. It’s one of my favorite Stephen King works.
The Last of Us influence runs deeper than tone. Barnett pointed out that both stories happen to feature a brother in Wyoming, which was not intentional at all. What he pulled on purpose was the revenge odyssey energy of the second game, which fed the dread in volume six.
Mostly, it is the intimacy.
I don’t think it loses the feeling of we’re here with the small group of people that we love as they brave untold dangers.
That small group is John, Mariah (his one-time lover, and a very strong personality in her own right), and Marcos, a thirteen-year-old deaf boy whose deafness turns into a genuine protective advantage against whatever is out there. Barnett got coy about the specifics. We respect that.
Inside the Nightmareland Omnibus Hardcover Edition
This edition is not six books shoved together for the sake of a bundle. Volumes one through six form a complete arc, and Lily works as a season finale that closes plot threads and lands consequences. The series keeps going from there, but things look different after it.
The art is where Barnett lit up. Leslé Kieu contributed six original black-and-white illustrations, and the process took eleven months. Barnett’s only real requirement was finding an artist willing to actually read the book, which he says is more the exception than the rule in publishing. After that, free rein.
I think that the best work is done by an artist when they’re excited to do what they’re doing.
Daniele Serra’s original cover artwork from the individual volumes shows up as backgrounds on the title pages in the hardcover. Serra is a British Fantasy Award winner who has worked on Hellraiser comics and a Tommyknockers special edition. Todd Keisling put the whole package together.
Meaghan flagged the part that matters most for readers who cannot drop money on a hardcover: the Kieu illustrations are in the Kindle edition too.
It’s great that they’re going to have the option to actually still be able to view all the hard work that was put into the artwork.
The serialized format has not gone anywhere either. Each volume still stands alone with its own beginning, middle, and end, because Barnett refused to write one story and chop it up arbitrarily to sell more units.
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How Daniel Barnett Plots a Twelve-Volume Horror Series
Twelve volumes are planned. He originally thought ten. Volume seven is finished, and he is deep into volume eight.
The method is stranger than a corkboard with red string. Barnett describes it as gardening: some days you are on the tomatoes, other days the rutabaga, planting things that will not come to fruition for years. He knows his endpoints. He just refuses to nail everything down, and he barely writes any of it down at all, which is almost superstition at this point.
The amount of stuff I don’t write down because I don’t want it to feel too concrete.
There are lines at the end of volume six that he carried in his head for years without recording them. Writing them down finally became the reward.
There is also a lullaby in the first six books that originally belonged to a different character, until one day he realized it hit harder coming from somewhere else. That single ownership swap made it far more significant.
He also gave us his survival odds in his own world, which are not good.
I take my dog and I’d run.
Remote is your best bet. As for the trait that keeps a character alive, he went with the ability to endure and hold on to hope, which he says is the thematic underpinning of the whole series. A character tells Marcos that all the best stories have hope and not to let anyone tell him otherwise.
But it is a long dark road.
Stephen King, Horror’s Reputation, and Barnett’s Recommendations
His favorite novel is the original version of The Stand. King is the one who showed him the kind of story he wanted to write: believable people in extraordinary circumstances, forged into something new (sometimes greater, sometimes worse).
Meaghan brought up the genre’s ongoing image problem.
Sometimes, generationally, there is a stigma around it being seen as lesser than as a genre.
Barnett agreed and offered the line he borrowed from someone else: horror is a big house, and there is a room in there for everyone. His better analogy was chemical.
How much sugar do you need to put in water before it’s not water anymore?
Horror is that foundational, and the emotional payoff of a story that goes to the darkest place rings clearer by contrast.
His recommendations: the original uncut Stand, Robin Hobb’s Assassin’s Apprentice (“I just finished it this morning. The tears are still drying“), and the film Doctor Sleep, which he says almost makes up for what Kubrick did to The Shining.
Because Kubrick left the Overlook standing, the movie gets a bigger climax than the novel does, and both hosts were fully on board with that read.
He also wants you to watch a full playthrough of The Last of Us Part II rather than the show. His words: night and day.
You can find Barnett on Instagram at @DBHfiction, on Facebook, and on Threads. The Nightmareland Omnibus lands September 1.