Rough Childhood

by Travis Zariwny

Overview

ROUGH CHILDHOOD is a brutal, hallucinatory, and emotionally charged graphic novel that plunges the reader into the subconscious trauma of childhood through the lens of surreal horror. Written and illustrated by acclaimed horror director and visual artist Travis Nicholas Zariwny, this 106 page work is not simply a collection of grotesque stories - it is a fevered, visual scream from the wounded psyche of a child. Fractured, poetic, and haunting, the novel dissolves the borders between memory, madness, and monstrosity. It is not a horror story in the traditional sense. It is horror in its purest emotional form.

ROUGH CHILDHOOD unfolds as a sequence of dark vignettes - visually distinct but thematically connected. Some stories are silent. Others are scrawled with the manic handwriting of a child trying to explain something no adult will understand. Faces are smeared, walls bend, voices echo from between panels. The visual style is decayed, expressive, chaotic, evoking a child's crayon drawings filtered through trauma and decay. This is horror that emerges not from a monster under the bed, but from the slow realization that the bed was never safe, and the monster may be your own voice.

The book has no central protagonist in a traditional sense. Instead, there is a recurring figure: a faceless, black-silhouetted child whose presence reappears through multiple stories. This child is the book's silent core, an observer, a victim, and sometimes the catalyst. Each story in ROUGH CHILDHOOD feels as though it has emerged from their subconscious - half memory, half nightmare, all pain.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798319608468
Publisher:	Barnes & Noble Press
Publication date:	06/22/2025
Pages:	106
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 11.00(h) x 0.28(d)

About the Author

Travis Nicholas Zariwny is an American filmmaker, writer, and visual artist best known for his bold, unsettling approach to horror and psychological storytelling. With a career that bridges independent film and experimental design, Zariwny has earned a cult following for his distinctive blend of cinematic tension, poetic darkness, and raw emotional truth.

He is the director of several acclaimed horror films, including Cabin Fever (2016), The Midnight Man, and Intruder, where his visual style and surreal sense of dread have drawn comparisons to auteurs like David Lynch, Ari Aster, and early Sam Raimi. But it is in the illustrated world of ROUGH CHILDHOOD that Zariwny delivers his most personal and uncompromising vision to date.

A lifelong painter and illustrator, Zariwny fuses his background in film, fine art, and narrative horror into a graphic novel that refuses to follow rules — choosing instead to bleed, scream, and fracture across every page. ROUGH CHILDHOOD is a culmination of decades of sketchbooks, subconscious imagery, and unspoken childhood memories filtered through his unique lens: one that sees horror not as spectacle, but as a mirror to the human soul.

Operating under his creative label ZENCANDY3000, Travis builds fully immersive visual worlds that explore identity, trauma, transformation, and psychological collapse. His work frequently draws from the gothic tradition of Poe and Goya, the surrealism of dreams, and the beauty found in broken things.

When not creating haunted stories or sketching hallucinated horrors, Zariwny lives surrounded by paper, ink, old horror movies, and the ghosts of ideas that never let go.