Freak Out With Your Geek Out – First Look: Face Your Fears in "CROWNSVILLE #"

My friends at Oni Press, unleashed a look inside CROWNSVILLE #1, the first in a chilling five-part series. The book is inspired by the real-life horrors of the notorious Maryland psychiatric hospital once called the “Hospital for the Negro Insane of Maryland” that preyed upon the segregated Black communities surrounding Annapolis, Maryland for decades.

CROWNSVILLE #1 is a haunting fusion of true crime, tension-addled thriller, and roaring supernatural horror from Rodney Barnes — the Eisner Award-nominated writer of Killadelphia and Peabody award-winning writer of The Boondocks and Wu-Tang: An American Saga — and acclaimed artist Elia Bonetti (Death of Wolverine: The Logan Legacy).

Here’s more:

Founded at the turn of the 20th century outside of Annapolis, MD, the Crownsville Hospital was a notoriously segregated, all-Black psychiatric institute. After decades of overcrowding and neglect— alongside darker, more-persistent rumors of patient abuse and illegal medical experiments—it was finally closed. Today, it stands condemned—a crumbling testament to a legacy of all-too-real terror inflicted on a marginalized and vulnerable community. But even as a ruin of its former self, Crownsville still casts a long shadow. . . . When an unexplained death inside the abandoned hospital is ruled a suicide, Annapolis police detective Mike Simms and journalist Paul Blairare are compelled to dig deeper, only to discover the reality of the horrors that once took place there . . . and the powerful connection they share to the anguished spirits of the dead that are still locked within its walls.