Here are Teddy Goldenberg’s dense, murky treatment of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Road Home,” often considered the first hard-boiled detective story ever published. Shawn Cheng renders the first serial-killer story, the so-called fairy tale “Bluebeard” by Charles Perrault. Landis Blair reimagines The Trial as a choose-your-own-adventure story that you cannot win. Plus twenty-three other contributors using a wide range of illustrative styles.

As with previous volumes in the Graphic Canon series, the illustrations run the full gamut of media and techniques, and artistic interpretations range from verbatim literalism to metaphorical extensions to surrealism and abstraction. The common theme, tracing the origins and standout texts of the morbid and mysterious, unites these multifarious partners in crime.