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Graphic Novel Review: Through the Woods by Emily Carroll (HWA Summer Scares Recommendation, Middle Grade)

Through the Woods by Emily Carroll

Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2014

ISBN: 978-1442465954

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition

 

Carroll’s Through the Woods includes five short sequential art stories, each one atmospheric and eerie. In “Our Neighbor’s House,” sisters Mary, Beth, and Hannah are left on their own after their father goes out to hunt, with instructions to venture to the neighbors’ house if he did not return by the end of the third day. When he does not return, they do not obey his instructions. Mary disappears, followed by Hannah, leaving only Beth. Before her sisters vanished, they talked of man smiling man wearing a wide brimmed black hat. Beth ventures out to her neighbors’ house, only to meet the strange man, who is not a man.

“A Lady’s Hands are Cold” tells the story of a newlywed couple venturing to his estate, which the heroine discovers to be haunted. A ghostly song leads the new bride through the vast mansion where she picks up deeply disturbing items left throughout the rooms, in the walls, pieces of a woman’s body. As I wrote in my Ax Wound review of Through the Woods in 2017, the song can be considered a character on its own. The winding blood red ectoplasmic ribbon that runs through the panels with white lettering is incredibly effective. After seeing how Carroll uses red in this story, I reread it and saw the implications of the colour itself. The man uses and consumes everything he possesses, including the women in his life. He uses them to death.

In “His Face All Red,” a man confesses to the murder of his brother. The brothers went out to hunt a mysterious beast that had been harassing the village. At the town hall, the young brother volunteers to track and kill the creature, but nobody takes him seriously until his brother stands smiling and declares they will hunt the beast together. He returns home after burying his brother with a story of avenging his brother. Afterward, he takes his brother’s place in the village. But what can he do when his brother comes back?

“My Friend Janna” centers on best friends Yvonne and the titular character. People wanting to talk with their dead relatives travel to visit Janna, who communes with spirits. What they don’t know is that it is all a ruse committed by the two friends. They want to stop, but people just keep coming, yearning to have contact with their loved ones one more time. Yvonne sees something following Janna, but is afraid to tell her friend.

In “The Nesting Place”, opens with the story of a monster that lived in the cellar with thousands of teeth, and a mysterious fog that fell over the town that contained many mouths. Bell’s older brother, Clarence, picks her up from the boarding school to stay with him and his fiancée Rebecca in the countryside after the death of their mother. She is warned by the housekeeper never to wander into the woods near the house, lest she become trapped there as Rebecca had. Bell sees strange things while she stays with Rebecca and Clarence: Rebecca’s teeth seeming to clack inhumanly as she eats, the strange red marks on the housekeeper’s wrists, and seeing Rebecca wander into the forest Bell was warned against exploring.

The five stories are situated between two short pieces. The beginning tells the story of a young girls’ fear of turning off the light at night after she was finished reading lest something pull her into the darkness. The piece at the end of the book presents a story of the same girl dressed in a red cloak walking home through the dark woods, curling up in her bed, and breathing a sigh of relief at the wolf not finding her…yet.

Rereading this after a few years hasn’t changed my mind. Through the Woods is a must-read for those who enjoy atmospheric and period piece horror. While Carroll does not indicate dates of any kind in her stories, it is easy to place time periods in which the stories are set based on attire, environment, and backgrounds in her artwork. Her use of color is deliberate and communicates very specific information to the reader. It’s a hauntingly beautiful graphic novel.

Highly recommended

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker

 

Posted on July 27, 2019 by , Reply

Book Review: Horror Needs No Passport: 20th Century Horror Literature Outside the U.S. and U.K. by Jess Nevins

Horror Needs No Passport: 20th Century Horror Literature Outside the U.S. and U.K. by Jess Nevins

Self-published, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-1717952257

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

 

Jess Nevins is a reference librarian at Lone Star College in Tomball, Texas and author of the World Fantasy Award-nominated Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana. He has written several titles on pulp fiction, Victoriana, and comic books, and annotated much of Alan Moore’s work.  In the introduction to Horror Has No Passport, Nevins explains that the book was born our of his frustration at the difficulty of finding a reference book that contained information on non-Anglophone horror and horror writers, as he attempted to write his own book, A Chilling Age of Horror: How 20th Century Horror Fiction Changed the Genre, to be released in 2020.  Nevins found that existing reference books on horror writers and supernatural literature were mostly focused on American and British writers, making it difficult to find information on authors and their works in non-English speaking and non-Western societies, with reputable sources such as The St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers and even the ambitiously-named three-volume Supernatural Literature of the World, edited by S.T. Joshi and Stefan Dziemianowicz(which, yowza, took three weeks to acquire through interlibrary loan from an academic library in another state), are limited in their coverage of authors and works from non-English speaking countries.

So, what’s a researcher to do?  While the previously mentioned reference guides are alphabetically organized, generally by author’s last name (although Joshi and Dziemianowicz also include essays on a variety of genre-related topics and some specific works) Nevins’ response was to collate information on authors and styles of writing from countries around the world, and write a capsule narrative of who was writing what at that time in that place, and what their influences were.  Since many of the countries he covers developed their horror traditions outside the context of Western literary traditions or had their own literature buried under the traditions deemed acceptable by Western colonizers, Nevins used the broader term fantastika, promoted by John Clute, which includes a wide variety of genres and subgenres that include fantastic elements. These can be but aren’t always confined solely to the horror genre. In the context of this work, Nevins defines horror as “fiction written to evoke fear and dread… including works in which evoking horror was only the secondary or even tertiary intent of the author”. With such a wide definition, the result is that the appearance of certain authors in this work was somewhat of a surprise to me– for instance, having read Nada by Carmen Laforet in a Spanish literature class, it never occured to me that it could be included in the horror genre. However, as was recently pointed out to me, including titles that induce that feeling of unease and dread but aren’t generally considered horror can add a dimension that allows the carving out a space in an area of writing and publishing that is not generally friendly to the “horror” label.

Horror Has No Passport  is divided into three parts, each covering a different period of time in the 20th century. Part one covers 1901-1939; part two covers 1940-1970; and part three covers 1971-2000. Each part is then divided into chapters: Africa, The Americas, Asia, Europe, and The Middle East. Each chapter is then broken down into capsule narratives on the countries Nevins was able to find information on. The countries covered in each chapter are not necessarily consistent from one time period to another: as time passes there is coverage of the literature of additional countries. Some countries and authors have better coverage than others.

As previously mentioned, this is not an alphabetical listing of authors’ biographical information and bibliographies. Even though Nevins compiled this volume to give researchers a reference to have at hand, it really doesn’t work as a stand-alone title– it just provides a starting place. Something I liked about this book that I didn’t see as much in Supernatural Literature of the World is the way Nevins drew connections between authors and their influences. For instance, index entries on Julio Cortazar point you not just to a paragraph about his work in the entry of Argentina, but to the names of authors who were influenced by him. This makes it easier to trace the threads of the development of the fantastic through time in that area of the world. However, it is disappointing that Nevins does not provide citations for all of his material. For instance, he provides no citation for his entry on Turkey in Chapter 10. he doesn’t provide a source for his information of Turkish authors Adnan Menderes and Kerime Nadir. While they are just briefly mentioned, there were other times when I looked for a citation so I could trace it and didn’t find a footnote. There is an extensive bibliography at the end, but more specificity in the footnotes would have been appreciated.

Horror Has No Passport overall seems to be relatively easy to navigate. The table of contents is accurate, organized and informative, the purpose and scope of the work are laid out in easy-to-understand language, I was able to find what I was looking for when I consulted the index, and it contains a detailed bibliography. I feel that it could have benefited from more accurate and frequent footnotes and/or in-text citations to refer the reader to specific sources, especially because the bibliography is so long, and as Nevins notes, many of the sources he used are not in English. My biggest quibble with this book is its formatting. Perhaps it is because this is self-published, or maybe it’s to reduce page count, but the cover does not have a name or title on it, the margins were practically invisible, spacing between lines was crowded, and the font size was almost to small for me to be able to read it. As readers, writers, and researchers strive to make horror fiction more inclusive, this inexpensive title, while not comprehensive, packs in a lot of information about 20th century horror outside the U.S. and Britain, and is a good starting point for further exploration of horror around the world.  Recommended.

Posted on July 25, 2019 by , Reply

Book Review: Terminal by Michaelbrent Collings

Terminal by Michaelbrent Collings
Independently published, 2019
ISBN-13: 978-1091873315
Available: Paperback and Kindle edition

The fog rolls in around an isolated bus terminal, and the eleven people inside are cut off from all communication with the outside world. Although the reader knows something is watching outside, reading about the events and characters in the terminal is almost as disorienting as it must be to the characters inside, who know nothing at all. This leads to a slow beginning, as complete strangers have to meet and work out what is going on before the pace can pick up. Once it does, though, the story is gripping. A cryptic message flashed to all of them tells them that unless they can choose one person unanimously to live, everyone will die. A second message, much later, offers this food for thought:  not just who most deserves to live, but who deserves to die. With the lights dimming and no way out, the group deduces that they have been trapped by alien creatures as part of a deadly experiment in human behavior.

Most of the group are strangers, although a few have a connection. In their midst are a drug dealer, an addict, a con man, a thief, a cutter, a Mary Kay saleslady, a pair of newlyweds, a grandmother, a gangbanger, a diabetic, a cop, a ticket taker (named Mary Holiday– really), a mother and daughter, and a neurodiverse computer expert named Adam S. Miles, who is referred to by his full name through the entire book. Some of these individuals have dangerous secrets, others’ are more mundane. Collings takes time with a few of the characters to show them more fully: Paul Kingsley, a cop determined not to kill; Mary Holiday, who has spent her entire life trying to make sure her daughter has a better one; Adam S. Miles, who is underestimated at the start but makes the majority of deductions and information dumps in the book; and Shelly Sherman, a Mary Kay consultant with a hidden past. Others have stories that have to be pieced together from various interactions, such as Bella Ricci and Jesus Flores, and a few are just sketched in briefly, so you don’t really have time to feel the impact when they die. I truly wasn’t sure how things were going to play out, and who was going to survive, and Collings totally blew me away with his ending,

There are a few things that really stick out in all of this. First, Collings’ handling and development of his autistic character, Adam S. Miles felt pretty respectful. It is rare to have a character with any kind of disability allowed to speak for themselves or presented as capable and independent. Yet, while other characters used ableist language to put him down, Adam S. Miles spoke up for himself. Collings also managed to avoid other disability tropes, such as making Adam an “inspirational”, “magical”, or “pitiful” character, all common stereotypes. I did feel like the upfront information on ableism and neurodiversity, while admirable, occasionally disrupted the flow of the writing. I think Collings relied on common stereotypes and tropes in developing some of his other characters (not especially surprising when he had to kill off 11 people in 327 pages) but I appreciated the care he put into Adam’s character.

Adam is also responsible for taking over a conversation about whether aliens could be responsible for the situation the characters find themselves in, listing multiple horrific experiments that humans have conducted on each other (I do want to note that while many of the examples Adam lists did occur, the summary of the Los Angeles vaccine study was misleading) to explain why aliens might do the same. I feel like this is a place where Collings is trying to hit home his message hard, of the horrors people, even ordinary people, will do to each other, simply because they can. It’s a little heavy-handed, but you’ll be right there with the people in the terminal as they beg him to stop listing off the cruelties people have inflicted on one another.  It’s shortly after this, as the deadline by which they must make their choice looms closer,  that the plot starts really speeding along, and the deaths start piling up.

As the story in the terminal ends, the survivor, who is typically herded into the next experimental location, short-circuits the experiment unexpectedly, and the creatures running it are left waiting for orders.  Will the experimenting end? Collings exposes the true horror of what it means for humans to be subjects in a cruel experiment run by an all-powerful authority.  Recommended.

Posted on July 24, 2019 by , 1 comment
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