#emily carroll

[thewindowofthesummerhouse]

Emily Carroll

[sailermoon]

Richard Adams, Watership Down // Emily Carroll, Through the Woods

[emmartian]

The three perfect things this year to keep me living much much more.

Armored Core VI Fires of Rubicon - From Software

I have a soft spot for games where “you” start so low: a corpse, an addict cop fell from grace, a drained bounty hunter sent to a planet alone to get her soul eaten by somehow gentle parasites. 

Armored Core 6 puts you in a body bag and promises to give you a meaning.

The game makes you feel in pain, both physically and mentally, yet you dance the fastest legs exquisitely, while the voices in your brain implants seem to notice you, to worry about you, to tell you you're an artist that can crave for even more.

You choose a how to see if you’re still here. And so, you fly high the miserable sky.

The Boy and the Heron - Studio Ghibli

I’ve read a lot of words about The Boy and the Heron by this point, looking to praise it by finding hidden sources, mysterious meanings and cultural roots behind its attributed “unorthodox” narrative. But I doubt this given depth was THAT intentional.

To me, this film might be the peak of Hayao Miyazaki’s philosophy for process and creation which is well known that doesn’t allow a glimpse of restraint. First and foremost, dealing with a canonical script.

A choice that brings freedom and obsession. A way to live, instead a way to create, to be the stories we tell ourselves. I strongly believe this is what the film exhales. Depth and meaning by making brilliant collaborators invested with the nurtured concepts in his brain. Depth and meaning by making us fall for the intense personality of such a hard work overall.

To grasp a gap in the system you have to be so bold. And I can't wait for what comes next.

A Guest in the House - Emily Carroll

As dear homie Sloane Leong says in her quote, a Guest in the House is a very sophisticated character study coded as a horror tale, with exquisite art, prose and pacing. 100% Emily’s trademark.

Personally, I still can't stop smiling at how it philosophically reads as an essay about evasion. On how skipping reality can be empowering and healing, and more than anything, romantic; even if, you know, it takes you to the grou… Please don't mind me.

Hide from hideous, grasp a glimpse of justice, make the self you want to be, legit. Toxic. The knight or the ghost. In Emily’s safe HUB, the guts spill into refined erotic scenarios that make the average the most dreadful place to be.

Anyway. You don't do a book on this scale alone, to save the day. The accurate craft still feels like a scream. It's the kind of work that saves the medium by making creators unsafe. Please consider reading it and support it. Emily’s writing truly is precious.

She also did a beautiful Bloodborne short out of love this year. For the fans!

[smashpages]

Emily Carroll has also posted a fan comic for the game Bloodborne by FromSoftware. It’s a beautiful, bloody, disturbing comic, much like the game itself, featuring the characters Adella and Arianna. It’s also got a good heap of gore and nudity, so consider it NSFW.

Read more

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Out The Door (2010) by Emily Carroll

Saving this here since it seems she deleted this comic from her website.

[gretashand]

very gorgeous art with a haunting story!!! highly recc grabbing a copy if youre a fan of poorly timed ghostly homosexual awakenings

[libraryleopard]

Adult horror graphic novel

Reminiscent of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca

After a lonely young woman marries a recently widowed dentist and moves to a new town for a fresh start with him and his daughter, she begins to suspect that her husband's first wife's death wasn't by natural causes

Gorgeously illustrated, unnerving, queer

Spoilery thoughts on the ending under the cut

Okay it's been a while since I read this, but I'm trying to recall what I thought of the ending since I'm reviewing it

It's certain and abrupt and ambiguous ending but here are things I remember putting together to try and understand it

Abby is probably an unreliable narrator whose own recollections are not always reliable (see: that part where she misremembers the children's picture book) and the scenes in color represent her fantasies/delusions of some kind?

Her husband is a forgetful man (we see him misremembering things), but didn't murder his wife–he was just in an unhappy marriage and lied to say she's dead to gain sympathy?

Beth is Sheila with a different haircut/hair color (I think the scene where Abby gets her hair cut is supposed to plant this idea), which is why she looks different than the photo Crystal has of her

She's been watching the family, but is not a ghost

The ghost is just a complete delusion of Abby's (this is why she's in color)

Abby killed her husband and left his body under the dock, then kills Sheila

Abby is also a repressed lesbian (I thought this was really clear to me but apparently other's didn't see this as so obvious haha)

[cafecliche]

Just reread Emily Carroll horror classic “Face All Red” which means you’re legally obligated to (re)read it too

[grinchwrapsupreme]

Hey uh what the FUCK was that <- just read A Guest in the House by Emily Carroll

[thewindowofthesummerhouse]

Emily Carroll

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The House on the Borderland (William Hope Hodgson) "Fishing buddies Tonnison and Berreggnog didn't bargain for what they found while on holiday near the remote Irish village of Kraighten. While walking along the riverbank, they're astonished to see that the river abruptly ends. It reappears as a surge from a chasm some 100 feet below the edge of an abyss, where also stand the remains of an oddly shaped house, half-swallowed by the pit.

Exploring the ruins, the friends discover the moldering journal of an unidentified man--the Recluse--who had lived in the house with his sister and faithful dog years ago. Its pages reveal the man's apparent descent into madness--how else to account for his chronicles of otherworldly visions, trips to other dimensions, and attacks by swine-like humanoid creatures that seem to have followed him home? After one particular vision in which he witnesses the end of the earth and time itself, the Recluse awakens in his study to find nothing has changed--except that his dog Pepper is dead, dissolved into a pile of dust. And then the "swine things" return…"

A Guest in the House (Emily Carroll) "After many lonely years, Abby’s just gotten married. She met her new husband—a recently widowed dentist—when he arrived in town with his young daughter, seeking a new start. Although it’s strange living in the shadow of her predecessor, Abby does her best to be a good wife and mother. But the more she learns about her new husband’s first wife, the more things don’t add up. And Abby starts to wonder . . . was Sheila’s death really by natural causes? As Abby sinks deeper into confusion, Sheila’s memory seems to become a force all its own, ensnaring Abby in a mystery that leaves her obsessed, fascinated, and desperately in love for the first time in her life" While most riffs on the Bluebeard story are probably slaughter, buried, or eye aligned, much of the horror in this story is the uncertainty and loss of a clear sense of reality. Also the art of Sheila feels very spiral.

[freckles-and-books]

I think I’m on week 4 or 5 in a row of preorders coming in, but I’m not sad about it.

Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas is also on the way 😈

[smashpages]

Out this week: A Guest in the House (First Second, $27.99):

Emily Carroll’s latest graphic novel is about a woman who marries a widower and moves in with him and his daughter — only to become haunted by the memory of his dead wife and obsessed with finding out what really happened to her. Horror at its best, in comics form.

See what else is arriving at your local comic shop this week.

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[cleave-and-plough]

words & music by neko case

art by emily carroll