![]() ![]() As I turned the pages, eyes goggling at Carroll's blood-drenched skies, her shadowy bedroom walls, I was taken right back to childhood. As Craig Thompson ( Blankets, Habibi) has already pointed out, Carroll's talent is immense: the mood of these stories is Brothers Grimm by way of Patricia Highsmith or Stephen King, while her drawings, so fluidly lavish and atmospheric, seem to channel Edward Gorey (like Gorey, many of her narratives are set in the past, her heroines struggling not only with ghouls and ghosts but with long skirts or, in the case of Bell, the clipped, superficial manners of the flapper 20s).īritish readers of a certain age may also be reminded of Jan Pienkowski's inky illustrations for Joan Aiken's classic 1971 retelling of European folk tales, The Kingdom Under the Sea – and for me, reading Through the Woods was indeed a powerfully nostalgic experience. ![]() The Nesting Place is one of five creepy gothic tales in Through the Woods, a wonderful new collection by the Canadian comic artist and writer Emily Carroll. Who is going to look at Mabel's rosy cheeks and shingled hair and see anything other than a charming young woman? Something is inside Mabel, something ghastly, and yet there is almost nothing Bell can do about it. Now, though, it seems as though they were warnings, statements of simple fact. ![]() Aaaah! Oh, it's horrible, this teeming visage, believe me (though I'd better not give too much away here), and suddenly Bell has every reason to remember her mother's stories. Interrupted, her future sister-in-law turns around to reveal a face that is…. Say, I've got a few dresses that might fit you… want to try them on?"), but she also has a dark secret, one that Bell discovers after wandering into a cave in the forest. It's a remote place, surrounded by thick woods, into which she is warned not to wander, and when her only ally – Madame Beauchamp, the housekeeper – disappears, she is more lonely than ever, her dreams populated by dozens of sets of teeth that bite into her and seem to cling on even when she wakes. Having spent her early childhood listening to her mother's scary stories – the worst kind of monsters, she was told, are those that burrow inside a person and eat them alive from the inside out – Bell is now an orphan who must spend her school holidays with her brother, Clarence, and his fiancee, Rebecca, at their house in the country. ![]()
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