Carroll, Emily. Through the Woods. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
Genre: Graphic Novel, Short Stories
Intended Audience: 14 and up
Personal reaction
This graphic novel was scary, but delightfully so. Through the Woods collects five or six short vignettes that could be classified in the horror genre. All the vignettes (I suppose you could call them short stories) were related to the theme that creepy, haunted, scary, predatory, etc things lurk in forests.
The vignettes were entertaining and thoroughly creepy. The style kind of reminded me of those Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books by Alvin Schwartz combined with vintage Tim Burton and a little bit Neil Gaiman with some Stephen King thrown in for good measure.
I liked that Carroll didn’t dial it back. I think this would be a good buy for a library’s Young Adult collection. That’s where I found it–in my library’s YA new releases. I would also maybe bring it out in October as it’s scary stuff. I think teens would enjoy it and would read it in an hour, like I did. It was also genuinely scary and in that way would appeal to fans of paranormal fiction.
Author Facts
- Carroll drew her first comic in 2010 and won the Joe Shuster Award for Outstanding Web Comic Creator thirteen months later.
- Carroll believes the key elements of a good scary story are: “…subtlety, ambiguity, and more often than not a generous helping of very earthly misery. I don’t like everything being resolved, I don’t like there ever being even the possibility of a solution really.”
- Carroll’s favorite story in the collection is “A Lady’s Hands are Cold.”
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