If I think back, pir*ted copies of BL graphic novels are what got me into dark romance smut in the first place. So hearing that Haunting Adeline is becoming a graphic novel made my sick little heart sing. I’m a visual…er…learner, so it will be nice to swap out text-only tales for a full-color, full-frontal hand-drawn art rendition of the infamous “gun scene,” et cetera.

Here’s the news: H.D. Carlton is teaming up with Deviant Ink Publishing, a whole imprint built specifically for romance and dark romance (be still my unhinged heart), to turn “Haunting Adeline” AND its sequel, “Hunting Adeline,” into full illustrated graphic novels. That’s right, we’re getting the entire duology, not just a teaser one-off to gauge interest. Zade’s whole descent into whatever Zade’s deal is gets the sequential-art treatment, start to finish.

This isn’t some cash-grab side project slapped together by a licensing team who’s never read the books. Carlton has said she’s wanted to see Zade and Addie’s stalker romance brought to life through actual artwork for a long time now. Honestly, it tracks. There is a very specific kind of reader-brain rot that happens when you spend four hundred pages inside a character’s head, and eventually you just need to SEE it. You need the moodboard made canon. Carlton clearly gets that, because apparently this has been a want, not just a whim.

The other detail that’s got me feeling optimistic (a rare and beautiful thing for me, truly): Carlton says she’s been closely involved in the Haunting Adeline graphic novel project herself, specifically to make sure it stays true to the original books. Which, if you’ve ever watched a beloved dark romance property get adapted by someone who fundamentally does not understand why the fans are obsessed in the first place (make the enemies in enemies-to-lovers hit HARD, please), you know exactly why that matters. This isn’t Carlton handing over the keys and walking away. She’s in the room. She’s making sure the version of Zade we get on the page still feels like the Zade we’ve all lost several years of our lives to.

So yeah: new format, same unhinged love story that I love, author actually supervising instead of just cashing a check. For a genre that gets adapted into things fans didn’t ask for more often than not, this one’s shaping up to be a rare case of “they might actually get it right.” I’m cautiously, aggressively optimistic. (Don’t ruin this for me, Deviant Ink.)

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