Emily Carroll’s Through the Woods is five short horror stories that all share one thesis: the scariest thing was never the monster, it was the person you trusted right up until you had a very good reason not to. If betrayal has ever rearranged your understanding of a relationship in real time, these are going to land somewhere specific. It’s a smaller, more literal cousin of the ambient dread running through Sacred Heart — betrayal as the actual monster, instead of a metaphor for one.
Carroll writes horror that lives in silence and implication instead of jump scares. The dread creeps in through what characters won’t say to each other, not what’s hiding behind them.
Story Themes
Our Neighbor’s House does abandonment as a slow unraveling — three sisters left alone long enough that “alone” stops being temporary and becomes the whole situation.
A Lady’s Hands Are Cold is about a woman’s silenced voice literally refusing to stay buried, which reads as either a ghost story or the most on-the-nose metaphor for “believe her” ever drawn in ink.
His Face All Red does guilt as a haunting that isn’t remotely subtle about who’s responsible.
My Friend Janna is about the specific unease of inventing a story convincingly enough that it stops behaving like fiction.
And The Nesting Place — the standout of the five — is body horror about realizing the person you depend on most has quietly become someone else, which might be the most unsettling premise in the whole book precisely because it doesn’t need a single ghost to work.
Art Style
Carroll works almost entirely in black, blood red, and stark white, and the restriction makes it more unsettling than full color would, like the story already decided what matters and isn’t handing you anything extra. The hand-lettering wobbles just enough to feel written in the dark. The panel layouts break convention exactly when a scene needs to feel like it’s coming apart. This is horror that understands restraint reads scarier than excess ever does.
The hand-lettered text and irregular panel layouts contribute to an organic, immersive reading experience, making each story feel whispered from an old folktale. The expressive, often distorted faces of the characters amplify the horror, evoking a sense of uncanny fear. Altogether, Carroll’s art style is hauntingly beautiful, evoking both classic gothic illustrations and the shadowy unknown lurking just beyond the page.
Conclusion
These aren’t stories that resolve so much as stories that linger — you’ll close the book and still be turning one of them over an hour later, probably the one about the person who wasn’t who you thought they were. If your taste runs toward horror that’s more dread than gore, this is exactly that, drawn by someone who clearly understands the difference between the two.
For more comics that sit with hard feelings instead of resolving them, Comics That Helped Me Process is a good place to keep going.
Through the Woods, by Emily Carroll, is published by Margaret K. McElderry Books.
