Through the Woods
Through the Woods is Emily Carroll's landmark collection of graphic horror — five illustrated tales that draw on fairy tale, folklore, and nightmare to unsettle rather than reassure.
Across the collection, a girl waits in the dark for a father who may never return; a young bride discovers her new home keeps a terrible secret; a man is haunted by the brother he wronged; a friendship curdles into something wrong; and a fiancée turns out to be far from what she seems. Each story circles death, transformation, and the unknowable dark just beyond the tree line.
Carroll's art — bold, inky, and drenched in red — makes the page itself part of the scare, using layout, negative space, and color to trap the reader inside each tale. Spare, dreamlike, and genuinely frightening, Through the Woods is a modern classic of the horror comic.
Narrator of "Our Neighbor's House"; one of three sisters left alone in a pioneer homestead when their father fails to return from hunting.
Narrator of "My Friend Janna"; helps her friend Janna fake being a medium and watches helplessly as things turn deadly.
Also called "Bell"; an orphaned schoolgirl in "The Nesting Place" who visits her brother Clarence and his fiancée Rebecca and discovers Rebecca's secret.
One of the three sisters in "Our Neighbor's House."
One of the three sisters in "Our Neighbor's House."
Through the Woods by E.M. Carroll is available from its publisher, Simon & Schuster. It can be found at bookstores and libraries. It is also available through online retailers.
Through the Woods won the 2015 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album—Reprint and the 2015 British Fantasy Award for Best Comic/Graphic Novel. Author Emily Carroll also won the 2015 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Artist for her work on the book.