Creatures & Corridors

Brandon Auman’s Creatures & Corridors starts with a strong premise and follows through. Set in the summer of 1992, the story follows 5 teens whose basement role-playing sessions stop being an escape and turn deadly. Their “game cave” becomes a real dungeon, filled with monsters, traps, and a Gamemaster who no longer stays in the realm of fantasy.

What makes the book work is Auman’s grasp of how close fantasy, fear, and adolescence already are. For teenagers, identity is unstable, friendship can shift overnight, and private obsessions can become public embarrassment fast. Creatures & Corridors gives that tension a supernatural form. The result is a horror-fantasy story with real emotional pressure, not just a pile of retro references.

The 1992 setting matters. It gives the book texture and draws on the old panic around banned games and outsider teen culture without leaning too hard on nostalgia. The book feels rough, tense, and a little grimy, which suits the material. This is not a polished throwback. It has more anxiety in its bloodstream than that.

Andrea Mutti’s artwork gives the story much of its force. The shift from suburban normalcy to nightmare dungeon logic needs to feel sudden and oppressive. It does. The monsters and traps land, but so does the deeper fear that the world these teens thought they understood is breaking apart. The art keeps that pressure close.

What lingers most is the book’s sense of how play can turn serious without losing its original shape. Auman does not mock imagination or treat it as a joke. He treats it as something powerful enough to become frightening. That choice gives the story its pulse.

Creatures & Corridors will work best for readers who like horror built on a sharp concept and strong atmosphere. It is tense, visually committed, and clear about what it wants to do. More than anything, it understands that for teenagers, fantasy is never only fantasy. Sometimes it keeps fear at a distance. Sometimes it opens the door.