Review by New York Times Review
YOU DON'T SCARE your children enough. I mean, to be fair, I don't know you. Maybe you scare them plenty. But most of us don't. We screen our children's books and movies for content that is "inappropriate"; incidents that might give them "nightmares." As we should. But when we're doing this, are we being too protective? Maybe. Children like to be scared. Ask a group of 9-year-olds if they'd like to hear a funny story or a scary story; they'll ask for a scary story just about every time. Why? Because they have an uncanny knack for knowing what they need. The best fiction weaves the ineffable into narrative; the warp and weft of scary fiction is the unsettling and the taboo. And because so much of a child's experience is novel, inexplicable and unsettling, narratives, including scary ones, are crucial. They help the child explore her most difficult feelings. Still, children want to feel safe. So you should do some censoring. For example, Emily Carroll's "Through the Woods," a collection of tales told in graphic form, is too disturbing and frightening to help an 8-year-old understand her internal world. A 13-year-old reader, though, or a 60-year-old reader for that matter, will be richly rewarded. And richly terrified. Carroll knows how to capture uncomfortable emotions - guilt, regret, possessiveness, envy - and transform them into hair-raising narratives. In a story inspired by Charles Perrault's "Bluebeard," a new bride stands before enormous panels of blue wallpaper, with stripes like prison bars. A song echoes through the house at night: "I married my love in the springtime,/but by summer he'd locked me away./He'd murdered me dead by the autumn, / and by winter I was naught but decay." In another tale, Carroll explores fraternal jealousy: The narrator begins by admitting, "Just last week, I killed my brother." And yet the brother, handsome and popular as ever, does not seem dead. The concluding panel of that tale literally made me yelp with fear. Like the best debut novels, "Through the Woods" is packed with ideas and experiments. New artistic techniques unfurl as the terror mounts, stunning visuals splash across the panels. Carroll effectively paces each tale, and the collection as a whole. "Through the Woods" is, in every sense of the word, thrilling. "Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales" features short stories from leading figures in the young adult genre. It is, itself, a strange beast: in parts luminous, in others revolting. Some tales in this volume feel slapdash; others are brutal, callously deploying sexual assault, self-harm and murder as mere plot points. But there are wonderful stories, too, by Holly Black, Cassandra Clare and Dylan Horrocks. There is the dystopian powerhouse "The Mercurials," by G. Carl Purcell, in which the dialogue crackles with the fierce stupidity and earnestness of real people. Nalo Hopkinson's "Left Foot, Right" and Alice Sola Kim's "Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying" are both potent, expressionistic horror stories. Hopkinson, deploying Caribbean myth and dialect, makes the aftermath of unspeakable trauma first monstrous, then survivable. In Kim's tale, three adopted Korean-American girls attempt to summon their biological mothers through a dark ritual. Kim writes with visceral urgency and distills the complex emotions of an adopted child into events of real horror. M.T. Anderson's "Quick Hill" takes place in a forlorn Middle America, haunted by the losses of World War II, and also by something worse, closer to home. Anderson balances the large and the small masterfully, and he makes magic realism the most bittersweet thing in the world. His sentences all end one word before you want them to, leaving your heart dangling, exposed. "Quick Hill" is a tour de force of contemporary short fiction. It does, as well as anything I've read recently, what scary stories are supposed to do: It says what we feel, but cannot say. ADAM GIDWITZ is the author of "A Tale Dark and Grimm," "In a Glass Grimmly" and "The Grimm Conclusion." He was a teacher for eight years.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 5, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* A wealthy young woman weds a man in a lonely old house, and at night she hears a forlorn song of unavenged murder lilting from the walls. A girl spends the summer with her brother and his fiancee, who is not what she seems. Three sisters wait for their father to return, but one by one they disappear with a tall man in a broad-brimmed hat. All the tales in Carroll's debut graphic novel are fairly standard ghost stories, but it is her eerie illustrations popping with bold color on black, glossy pages that masterfully build terrifying tension and a keep-the-lights-on atmosphere. With cantilevered perspectives and dark inky splotches speckling the corners, the spooky images of stark forests, gaping caves, bloodshot eyes, and ominous shadows are brilliantly married to the text printed in manic handwritten fonts, some crazed and swirling, others coldly deadpan. The best ghost stories make great use of dramatic tension, and Carroll is no slouch here, either: she amplifies the scariness of the stories full of ghosts, murder, and monsters with startling page turns revealing grotesque, squeal-inducing images. A wonderful heir to the legacy of Alvin Schwartz and Stephan Gammell's iconic Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (1981).--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Canadian graphic artist Carroll uses familiar horror motifs-the first wife's ghost, the monster that dwells in the forest-to create fresh and disturbing tales. Sure in her handling of line, color, and sequential art techniques, she revels in period settings, placing her five stories in identifiable historical eras that include colonial North America and the Roaring Twenties. Carefully drawn clothing and furnishings provide ironic backdrops for Lovecraftian revelations of parasitical possession and hideous evil. In the most explicitly gruesome story, a dowdy girl named Mabel is forced to stay with her prosperous brother and his perfect wife, who, Mabel begins to see, is a monster inhabiting the skin of a human: "I only wanted to wear her," the wife says dreamily of the housekeeper, whose bloodied wrist Mabel has spotted, "but when I tried her on, there was no stretch left." Instead of the gratifying defeat of evil, the gothic stories often leave off unsettlingly with a twist of the knife, just at the moment some fresh horror beckons. Ages 14-up. Agent: Jen Linnan, Linnan Literary Management. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 8 Up-Not exactly a book of fairy tales, these illustrated short stories are more a series of ruminations interwoven with dreams and fairy tales. Classic elements are here-there's a girl in a red hooded cloak, and a girl who wears a ribbon around her throat-but the entries expand and wander in different (and darker) directions. The illustrations (done in ink and graphite on Bristol board and then digitally colored) fill the entire page, so at first glance the work looks more like a picture book than a graphic novel. The hues are bold and striking, with the color red dominating the pages in the form of sunsets, flushed cheeks, bloodshot eyes, twisted word balloons, a deep crimson ruby, and even pools of blood. This collection contains four new stories and one ("His Face All Red") that was originally published as a webcomic on Carroll's website. This is a beautifully rendered but deeply chilling collection of vignettes that will be most appreciated by teens and adults who are fans of fairy tales, horror, and the things that hide in the dark. A delight for Edgar Allan Poe and Alvin Schwartz enthusiasts.-Andrea Lipinski, New York Public Library (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
Carroll crafts five unsettling tales in graphic-novel format inspired by common folkloric themes -- from wolves in the woods to peculiar visitors to dark possessions. In "Our Neighbor's House," three sisters who find themselves alone in a cabin are taken, one by one, in the middle of the night by a smiling stranger. In "A Lady's Hands Are Cold," a young bride is tormented by the singing corpse of her new husband's first wife, dismembered and disposed of within the walls of his manor. A man comes face to face with the sinister doppelganger of the brother he murdered in "His Face All Red," while "My Friend Janna" and "The Nesting Place" focus on malevolent spirit possession. Carroll experiments with the uncanny, presenting characters and settings that are both familiar and alien. She posits that "the worst kind of monster was the burrowing kind. The sort that crawled into you and made a home there," and that's exactly what Carroll accomplishes, burrowing inside the reader's mind and twisting what should be safe into something startlingly strange. For instance, one illustration of a little girl tucked into bed evokes Goodnight Moon, with its green, yellow, and red palette; yet the safety of that childhood bedtime story is stripped away when a wolf stalks up to the window. Swirling, chaotic, hand-lettered, and ink-smudged illustrations (at times reminiscent of Stephen Gammell) bring each grisly story to life. shara l. hardeson (c) Copyright 2014. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A print and Web comics artist offers five creep-out chillers (four new) with folk-tale motifs and thoroughly disquieting art.Well-placed lines of terse, hand-lettered commentary and dialogue reinforce narrative connections but are also as much visual elements as are the impenetrable shadows, grim figures, and stark, crimson highlights in Carrolls inky pictures. Making expert use of silent sequences, sudden close-ups and other cinematic techniques to crank up the terror, the author opens and closes in a dimly lit bedroom (much like yours), bookending the five primary stories. In Our Neighbors House, a trio of sisters are taken one by one by a never-seen smiling man. In the next, a bride discovers that A Ladys Hands Are Coldas are the other pieces (seen in close, icky detail) of her husbands dismembered but not entirely dead former wife. Two cases of supernatural possession (His Face All Red and My Friend Janna) follow. The collection is capped by a true screamer in which a teenagers memories of her mothers tales of a cellar-dwelling monster with a sweet, wet voice segue into a horrific revelation about her pretty new sister-in-law. Lonely houses, dark woods and wolves? Check. Spectral figures with blood-red innards? Check. Writhing tentacles bursting from suddenly inhuman mouths? Check!A sure winner for any reader with a yen to become permanently terrified. Brilliant. (Graphic horror. 13-18) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
