A Guest in the House

July 1, 2023
Carroll brings her deliciously disquieting style to this gothic tale of a new marriage and the sinister secrets lurking beneath the veneer of cozy domesticity. Lonely, insecure Abby claims to enjoy being a wife and mother after marrying David, a widower with one child, Crystal, and moving to their lakefront home. Yet Abby is haunted by the presence of Sheila, his first wife: at first, through Abby's own doubts about living up to Sheila's memory, and then literally, as she begins seeing a ghost as beautiful and captivating as she imagines Sheila was. Hinting that her death wasn't natural, Sheila fits perfectly into Abby's rich inner fantasy life, in which she is a powerful knight slaying dragons and rescuing princesses. Readers will think they know where the story is going as Abby uncovers discrepancies in David's story, and Crystal starts drawing pictures of a woman under the water, but Carroll takes this familiar tale into new territory. Abby's bland reality is presented in shades of gray, while her fairy-tale fantasies are rendered in lurid colors that swirl through the pages, eventually bleeding together in a hallucinatory landscape that is both gorgeous and ghastly. The shocking ending is confusing enough to be jarring, but there is no better marriage than Carroll's strong writing and her incredible artwork.

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April 10, 2023
Echoes of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca abound in this fantastic and frightening graphic novel from Eisner Award winner Carroll (Through the Woods). Quiet convenience store clerk Abby has just recently married David, an older dentist and single father to Crystal. David’s first wife, Sheila, died tragically. In something of an oft-used horror trope, Crystal has been seeing and drawing pictures of Sheila, and before long, Abby herself begins seeing a spirit identifying itself as Sheila. At first the specter appears creature-like before morphing into a beautiful princess from a fairy tale Abby used to read as a child—the same tale Crystal is reading now. To say any more about the story risks diluting its thrills and chills; the narrative takes readers to places both familiar and shockingly not. What’s most remarkable is Carroll’s phantasmagoric artwork, at once mesmerizing and teeth-clenchingly macabre, like Miyazaki gone goth. Almost every page is a dreamscape in which, like the hallways of a wondrous house, one might not mind getting lost. Personality-wise the characters are a bit milquetoast—Abby perhaps purposefully so—but Carroll’s linework and coloring render them in shades melancholy, whimsical, and sinister. While the ending might invite more questions than answers, the wild turns taken and the dazzling visuals make this one scary good.