An 'illustrated' theme today; this graphic novel by Emily Carroll collects together five deliciously chilling and haunting stories, all set in a Gothic-y, Grimms-y forest world somewhere between about 1800 and about 1920. These tales work through fascinations with murder, guilt, the disinclination of the dead to rest calmly in their graves. It's beautifully done. The worst I might say is that the illustrations, and the choices Carroll has made about individual or multiple panels, occasionally force or compress the pacing in ways that seemed to me disadvantageous to the larger mood;
More, at the end of the day Through the Woods is only five, fairly short stories, which perhaps makes the book seem, overall, a touch slight. But they are all very cleverly constructed, readable and every one of them stays with you after you've finished. That's the true test of this sort of tale.
The visual style is clear-line and moderately exaggerated cartoon-y figures rendered in a more atmospherically realised world of bold primary colours, blocks of composition and filigree detail. The latter are better than the former, and the art is (I thought) better as establishing an initial mood of unease and dread...
...than at cashing-in shock moments, or startling us with visualised horror:
You may disagree, of course: these things are not measured against absolute aesthetic tables, but upon the pulse of the individual reader. And it's possible I'm only registering the old truth of horror: what's not shown but intimated is much, much more terrifying than what's shown. It's not in the thing that terror resides, you see: it's in our own minds.
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