Through the Woods by Emily Carrol

Note: This review was originally written in late September.

It is officially autumn and I can feel it. The leaves are changing and pumpkin spice lattes are everywhere (even McDonalds has jumped on the bandwagon… gross). It’s also getting cold outside, I’m starting to have to bundle up whenever I want to leave my warm apartment. All of this combined has pleasantly put me in a premature Halloween mood, I’ve been binge watching horror movies and starting to eye up which fun sized candy I’m going to allow myself to indulge in this year. So needless to say my reading taste has shifted with my mood and has made me pick up the most Halloweeny book on my shelf and blaze through it a few days ago. This book was Through the Woods by Emily Carroll, a young adult graphic novel which employs several genres including fantasy, horror with a fairy tale twist. It’s also a compilation of short stories, which is awesome because I love short stories, especially of the creepy variety. So basically it was perfect for how I was feeling.

However, I’m at a bit of a loss on how to review it. I walked away from the novel feeling very uninspired. I really liked the art work, but I don’t know anything about art so I can’t speak from that perspective really, other than I thought that the grey scale drawings with splashes of red was really eye catching and perfect for the tone of the stories. I actually think the art work was the best part of this book. There were pages that I just stared at, trying to take in every detail. They were beautiful, creepy but still kept much to the imagination which is something that I think most media in the horror genre needs to employ more (our minds are so much better at creeping us out than our eyes). I think that if Emily Carroll came out with another book I would buy it simply because of her art style is so captivating, it would make an excellent coffee table book because it’s fun to flip through.

The book is split up into 5 short stories, plus an introduction and a conclusion. They’re all so different and I have such varying options on each one that it would be unfair to group them in together so I will do a mini review of each one individually.

“An Introduction”

This is surprisingly one of my favourite sections of the book. It really sets the mood and makes you think that you’re going to be in for a creepy ride. When I picked up this book it was late at night and reading the introduction actually made me think about putting it down and picking it up when it was lighter outside. I decided to keep one reading, but it was really tempting to chicken out. While there’s not much of a story to this part of the book, it does really encompass what it’s like to be scared of the dark as a child. 5/5 stars.

“Our Neighbours House”

This one started out beautifully. This story is about three sisters, after their father goes on a journey they are instructed to go to their neighbour’s house if he doesn’t return in three days. When he doesn’t return, they decide to stay and then some of the sisters have encounters with a man in a wide brim hat. These meetings end up altering their moods before they disappear. This story in my opinion looks the nicest (the cover art of the novel is of this story) and has the most interesting premise but it felt lacking at the end. I actually thought that maybe I skipped a page… I like things left to the imagination but I don’t really know what to think of this. I feel like there might have been some deeper meaning that I went over my head and I missed the point. That or the author didn’t know how to end it. I gave it a 2.5/5 stars simply because I thought that it could have been expanded upon a bit, and I ended up having a lot of questions at the end.

“A Lady’s Hand Are Cold”

I have a lot of jumbled thoughts on this story. Bear with me.

Now I may have an unfair opinion about this one but I want you to hear me out. Have you ever heard of Angela Carter? She was a feminist writer who, in 1979, published a compilation of short stories entitled The Bloody Chamber and other Stories, in which she took classic fairy tales and retold them through a feminist lens, focusing primarily on the sexual submission that is imposed onto women. The title story “The Bloody Chamber” was a retelling of Bluebeard. In this story a young french girl is married off to a noble lord and discovers that he is sadistic and cruel, he forces her to wear a chocker of rubies and she eventually find his dead wives in the castle. It’s great, it’s one of my favourite short stories, it’s creepy, off-putting and disturbing. “A Lady’s Hands Are Cold” is basically “The Bloody Chamber” but without the glorious ending and the rhetorical depth that Carter employed in her work. The lead character in Carroll’s work even wears a ruby necklace. I’m not the only one who has noticed this similarity, Carroll herself has addressed this topic in this interview with The Room. I want to be clear that I am not accusing Carroll of plagiarism or anything of the sort, the stories are different but they are also similar enough that I had difficulty detaching them from one another. I just want to give this information so you can understand my background and where my mind went while I was reading this short story. Perhaps, I would have enjoyed this much more had I not been exposed to something with such similar plot but a more complex narrative just a few months ago.

Much like “Our Neighbours House” I found this story anti-climatic. I felt that this segment of the book may have been more complete, story wise, than the previous narrative but I think it could gone farther. I thought that the protagonist had just grown enough to make her interesting by the time the story ended, and she wasn’t engaging enough to make me attached to her in anyway. I just wasn’t that invested in her so I didn’t find the story as suspenseful and eerie as it was meant to be. Perhaps that’s the the restraints of writing short comics.

The artwork in this piece was, for me, the least pleasing aesthetically but also probably the most interesting. The colour yellow is utilized a lot, and it’s obviously a symbol for something. It’s so rare to see yellow as a symbol for something negative in modern literature that my mind immediately went to the Yellow Nineties, in Victorian England and of course The Yellow Book. The colour yellow in this context is tied to French decadence movement which had moved to Victorian England during the fin de siecle (meaning end of the century, specifically the end of the 19th century). But I don’t think that this is an accurate because if that’s what Carroll was going for I think she would have tried to take on the style of Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings which were prominent in The Yellow Book. I ended up deciding that yellow was representative of femininity and innocence (her flowers, comb, and dress all being yellow) while blue in contrast was masculinity, death and dominance, but I’m not sure. I liked that the symbolism wasn’t entirely clear and there was a lot of room for interpretation.

While I wasn’t a fan of the storyline I think that the artwork in this piece would be an excellent piece of evidence in the comic books are art argument. 1.5/5 stars.

“His Face All Red”

This is my favourite story out of the bunch. You can actually read it on Carroll’s website for free if you want to give it a try, but believe me it looks much better in the physical copy than the web version. The art is much larger in the graphic novel and it really sucks you in. The reason it’s so good is that it’s genuinely creepy, the last panel is chilling. I literally got chills from it. It’s awesome.

The first line “This is not my brother” really sums up the mood of the story. it’s cryptic, it’s eerie, it’s mysterious, it’s everything I wanted from the graphic novel. I don’t want to give too much away because I think it would ruin the experience but I do think that this work perfectly balances the art of not giving too much away while still having a fleshed out and complete storyline. 5/5 stars.

“My Friend Janna”

This is a cool idea. I think it’s smart to write a story about a woman who pretends to see ghosts and then actually becomes haunted by one. I liked the female friendship in this story and I really enjoyed the ending. I liked that Carroll showed us Janna’s writing as well. Very cool story but not something that will keep you up at night. I don't really have that much to say about this though. It was cool but kinda left me feeling blasé.

3.5/5 stars.

“The Nesting Place”

I really liked this one, but it seemed a bit out of place compared to the rest of the stories. It’s reminiscent of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It felt more like a science fiction than a fantasy horror. The story follows Mabel, a young woman, as she moves in with her brother, but she soon discovers that something is not quite right with his new fiancée. I think it may be the longest story in the collection and I think it benefits from that a lot, the extra amount of pages really helps flesh out the story, the characters and the tone of the work. This work is a bit campier than Carroll’s others but I did enjoy it. I believe that if the first two stories had been this length they would have been up to par with the last three tales in the compilation. 4/5 stars.

“In Conclusion”

This is where the book’s famous quote about the wolf comes from. It’s a great way to end off the story while maintaining the tone that Carroll delivered throughout the book. While there isn’t much to this segment narrative wise I did enjoy it. 4/5

Ultimately, I think that this book delivered in regards to the artwork and some of the ideas were fantastic but it left me wanting more. I think that had this book been a bit spookier I would have enjoyed it a lot more than I did. For that reason I gave Through the Wood

s 3.5/5 stars.