about the book
A girl in a red hood. A first wife’s ghost. A monster in the woods. These may seem like familiar scary stories, but just a few lines in, it is quite obvious that these are new and very disturbing tales! Parasitical possession, hideous evil, macabre Gothic mayhem—if you expect good to triumph over evil in the end, go pick out another book!
With an eye to details, writer and illustrator Emily Carroll sets her haunting tales in historical period settings, such as the Roaring Twenties and Colonial North America. The spooky and dramatic illustrations and elaborate layouts are bright and striking, with the color red dominating. The oversized art fills the entire page, making the chilling collection more like a picture book than a graphic novel.
In total there are only five stories…but they are all deeply dark. One is a collection of Carroll’s phenomenally popular webcomic entitled “His Face All Red”; the other four tales are all new.
In “Our Neighbor’s House”, a fairy tale that goes all wrong, you can get where you are going, but coming back home is a real problem. The young bride in “A Lady’s Hands Are Cold” finds herself in a house that holds a horrible secret. Readers will have to figure out who is haunting “My Friend Janna”, and in “The Nesting Place”, dowdy Mabel discovers her brother’s bubbly fiancée has a really strange fashion sense!
Morality has no place here. With unpredictable and unsettling twists galore, in these tales no one leaves without a scar or two. It’s only a matter of time before someone has a real nightmare…will it be you?
about the author
Emily Carroll likes to write and draw scary stuff. When she was a kid, her favorite stories were the ones that creeped her out the most! She happened to stumble on Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and In a Dark, Dark Room by Alvin Schwartz, books that were often banned from libraries because of the extremely disturbing illustrations. When she got older and reread them, Emily found that the writing, the language, and the simplicity of the tales made them so frightening for her. She became determined to write in the same way.
Emily’s work is found in many print anthologies, on her website, and on video games. Through the Woods is her first graphic novel. Which of the five stories in the novel is her favorite? Without a doubt, she says it is “A Lady’s Hands Are Cold.” Overtly fairy-tale inspired, it is a variant of the Bluebeard saga (one of her favorites) and is closest to the ones that scared her as a child. It is also the one that was the most fun to draw. She is thrilled that it ended up exactly how she envisioned it in her mind—she says that doesn’t happen often!
Emily admits she is a fussy artist. To get her collage effect, she draws the elements of each panel separately and then arranges and colors it on the computer. She also does all the lettering by hand, which is time consuming, a lot of work, and most often frustrating!
Since this comic artist never did and still does not draw superheroes like most illustrators, it took her a long time to publish her work. “I didn’t imagine that anyone would be interested in things that I was making up, let alone pay me to do them!”
Emily was born in June of 1983 and grew up in London, Ontario, Canada. After graduating from Sheridan College’s Classical Animation program, she moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, to work. Now she is back in Ontario, living in Stratford with her wife, Kate Craig, and their big orange kitty.
Sources:
Author/illustrator website
Author interview : The Thought Fox
Book/author profile : Amazon
Author interview & photo : National Post
Book trailer: Through the Woods
read more!
Daybreak by Brian Ralph
Drawn from the perspective of the reader, this tale starts when the silent reader wakes up to a post-apocalyptical world in rubble. Leaning over the reader is a cheery but desperate one-armed man. After a quick greeting, the reader and his new protector take off through the rubble. Hiding underground, can they survive the minute-by-minute imminent zombie threat?
Ichiro by Ryan Inzana
After spending his life being raised in the United States, half-American, half-Japanese Ichiro feels out of place when he goes to Japan to stay with his grandfather. Soon after, Ichiro is dragged down a hole by a monster and realizes he has left the mortal world and entered the domain of the gods.
Trollhunters (Book 1) by Guillermo del Toro & Daniel Kraus
Jim Sturges’ dad is overprotective, his best friend’s name is Tubby, and the girl he has a crush on doesn’t know he exists. In other words, he’s your typical teenager. But then he starts seeing red-eyed monsters that no one else sees. Does this have anything to do with a mystery that happened 45 years ago?