Cramps | Children of the Night

Fifty years after the Cramps first crawled onto a New York stage in 1976, Children of the Night: A Graphic Compendium of the Cramps celebrates one of the strangest, sexiest, and most visually commanding bands America ever produced.

Lux Interior and Poison Ivy Rorschach did more than make records. Across a 33-year career, the Cramps created an entire cultural universe from the beautiful wreckage of postwar America: obscure rock ’n’ roll 45s, B-movies, monster magazines, EC horror comics, striptease, psychotronic television, garage trash, juvenile delinquency, exploitation cinema, sartorial swagger, and everything polite culture had consigned to the dump.

Built from Andrew Krivine’s decades of obsessive collecting—and enriched by fellow Cramps fiends, archivists, and collectors—Children of the Night brings together an extraordinary array of posters, flyers, record graphics, badges, fanzines, fan-club relics, and other ephemera tracing the evolution of the band’s visual identity from the primordial CBGB years to the end of their career.

But this is more than an archive. Essays by Krivine, Kogar the Swinging Ape, and Diego Carreiro excavate the secret cultural genealogy behind the Cramps—from Charlie Feathers and Hasil Adkins to Mad Daddy, Ghoulardi, horror television, exploitation movies, and the underground American imagination. At its radioactive center is an English translation of Lux and Ivy’s 1986 “B-Culture” manifesto: their own declaration of faith in cheapness, delirium, bad taste, emotional truth, and the discarded margins of popular culture.

The Cramps didn’t simply occupy a corner of punk, goth, rockabilly, or psychobilly. They made their own territory—and generations of beautiful misfits have been wandering into it ever since.

This isn’t a book explaining the Cramps. It’s the world that made the Cramps—and the world the Cramps made—finally collected between two covers.

DELUXE HARDCOVER EDITION
CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT
BY ANDREW KRIVINE
SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
ISBN: 978-1-938537-46-2 | $44.95 list

DOMESTIC U.S. PRE-ORDER: $44.95
Ships November 2026
(includes shipping!)
HARDCOVER · 180 PAGES · FULLY ILLUSTRATED · FIRST EDITION OF 500 · $44.95 DELIVERED

DELUXE HARDCOVER EDITION
CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT
BY ANDREW KRIVINE
SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
ISBN: 978-1-938537-46-2 | $44.95 list + $30 shipping

INTERNATIONAL PRE-ORDER: $69.95
Ships November 2026
(includes shipping!)

And don't miss this: Concurrently, with the launch of Children of the Night, the Las Vegas-based Punk Rock Museum is presenting an exhibition also dedicated to the band's visual legacy. This radically incredible (buy the hype) exhibit opened Friday, October 23, 2026 --> CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT: THE VISUAL WORLD OF THE CRAMPS!

The book is presently in production, ships in November, 2026, and will be featured at the Punk Rock Museum and available worldwide!