Through the Woods

One of the most fascinating things about reading horror is figuring out what personal dread is haunting the author's mind. For Junji Ito, it's that viral infectious evil entity that you can't escape, like a stench of the idea of the spiral. Stephen King has got a thing for the creepy nature of childhoods spent in small towns. Emily Carroll clearly has a thing about body snatchers. Changelings, possession, the slow creeping dread of realizing that someone close to you is not who they used to be.

The only story in this collection that I read before was His Face All Red, and its still probably my favorite. It's the most open-ended of the stories, and perfectly encapsulates that body snatcher fear, while also incorporating some Tell-Tale Heart style guilt and paranoia. The rest of the stories have a similar tilt. A girl waits for her father to return while each of her siblings slowly disappear, a new bride hears the voice of her deceased predecessor coming from the floorboards, a young woman watches as her best friend is taken over by a strange entity. All are stories about people left alone in strange and haunting scenarios, who see things that no one else can. Carroll also has a thing for outcasts, the people who are never good enough, not well-liked or remembered. The most vulnerable among us.

Carroll is not only fantastic at telling creepy stories but using every bit of her artistic ability to support their frightening nature. Her style is classical and deceptively simple, with a gothic and abstract flair. I will never get tired of her work. I wish I could write something this spooky.

This is a strange and lovely book. If I I judged this book entirely on illustration and panel flowing from one scene to the next, easy 5 stars. The graphics are very well done and effective. However, the stories feel almost like they are choppy. Some of the stories, specifically the ones with the worms was really good, while the others were just ok. I'd give it a chance just so you can look at the images and embrace the crazy style.

I've always loved the woods. I love the mostly untouched nature and all it's beauty. I love it when the sun's shimmering through the trees during the day, and I respect and fear it during the night. When trees and branches get distorted and forming shadows, that your brain interprets as pure terror.

I think everyone feared the woods at night as a child, and many adults still do. They were/are the perfect embodiment of all our fears.

Through the Woods captures this feeling of fear and terror, I felt as a kid in the most perfect way. Even though not really centered around the woods, they're still in every story one way or another. Every tale has its own distinctive art style, and different feeling. But they're all so beautifully detailed that it's easy to get lost in them. The panels are cleverly used, and between illustrations of beauty there are drawings of horrors from deep within your nightmares. But still, the horror elements are more subtle, left to flourish in your head rather than graphic. It's like your every childhood fear come to paper.

“I dreamt a Captain dressed in greyI dreamt I wore a long white coatI dreamt a stone caught in my throatI dreamt I chokedand chokedand choked”I recommend this beauty of a book to everyone, that still knows about the now embarrassing things that we feared as a child. This book makes you revisit them and who knows, maybe they weren't so reasonless?

Ooky spooky! This was such a creative and chilling collection of short stories! A commonality with collections like these is that there's generally at least one not-as-good story in the bunch. Here, however, they're all equally compelling! My one complaint is that the stories were all too short and felt incomplete. I do enjoy an ambiguous ending, but some of them were too ambiguous and I felt we moved on to the next story too abruptly. I may revisit this in the colder months. :)

Couldn't resist snapping up this debut print collection of five horror stories written and illustrated by Emily Carroll. The stories are creepy and fun and usually have a surprising twist. The illustrations are inventive and the use of color is impressive. I've since learned that the author has developed a following from her website, emcarroll.com, and I'm going to need to revisit that.