“Through the Woods” by Emily Carroll, in which I get creeped out and decide the woods are the best place to hide

For those of you who do not know, there is a webcomic series called “Deep Dark Fears”, where people submit anxieties they have or weird or traumatic ideas and fears that they had as children. It’s a great comic for anyone who has anxiety and invasive thoughts, and I used to especially love them because to me they embodied a mindset that I found it hard to come by.

            I love the idea of paranoid delusion. I have loved it since 2014, when I would spend all day listening to creepy-pasta’s on YouTube, in the mostly empty apartment where my family was living at the time. I was already very misanthropic at the time and to me, this view of the world, as being uncertain and filled with dark things that we can’t notice, was very enticing.

            I’m not as paranoid as I think I once was, but I still suffer from a lot of the same anxieties and issues and I feel this, maddening kind of uncertainty (unable to trust anyone, unable to trust your own perception) is a perfect metaphor for the way that a lot of us live our lives. It also makes for some cool horror stories, which is why I have been trying to replicate that sensation in my own stories since I first discovered that mood.

            (Above is one of the Deep Dark Fears Comics. You can buy a collection of these comics and support the artist by following this link https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Dark-Fears-Fran-Krause/dp/1607748150)

“Through the Woods” is so good at replicating that mood, that when I first picked it up, I thought it was by the same person who made “Deep Dark Fears”. The art style is, in some frames, very similar. But in others, it’s obvious they’re separate. But, because “Through the Woods” does such a good job of exploring anxiety through supernatural horror and uncertainty, and because it had been so long since I read “Deep Dark Fears”, I was at first convinced it was the same person.

It is not, of course. “Through the Woods” is by Emily Carroll and the format is completely different to be fair. “Through the Woods” is an anthology, with various monsters and ghosts lurking throughout it, sometimes tied together with some thematic ideas, but all relatively separate. The “Deep Dark Fears” comics are usually 4-panels, with no dialogue between characters. I’m glad I got something a little more structured, but still varied enough that each story feels separate and cool.

I think that Carroll is a genius. Some of her stories have more predictable twist endings than others and some of them don’t really have much explanation to the events that take place in them. However, I think I like that. It reminds me of old campfire stories and the creepypasta stories and of classic Twilight Zone episodes. Because of the nature of the stories, when I finished the first one, I thought it was just a chapter in a story that ran throughout the book. And while I do hope that Emily Carroll makes something like that (she has an undeniable gift for expression and color) I am glad that I got this instead.

I would recommend you go and buy it or pick it up at a library near you, at this point, as there are going to be some spoilers moving forward.

            The stories all feel like they take place in different periods of time, but none are quite modern. Some of the monsters are more predictable, less disturbing than others. But I think they all fit quite nicely. The stories all seem to have some kind of moral to them, some of them particularly depressing, but they aren’t really about being moral as much as they are about trying to creep you out. Except for maybe the last two. The second to last story features a bone-chilling moment in which you come to realize that because the main character (a young woman) is shunned for being gloomy and not very pretty by society, something utterly horrible is going to be allowed to happen to her. 

            And that moment is followed by the perfect moment of showing how monstrous real life is when viewed from an outsider’s perspective. All the while, these perfect discussions are accompanied by upsetting images that will stick in your mind.

            Then, in the last story, we get a red-riding hood parallel, where we come to the conclusion that just because we survive one brush with the darkness (death, depression, anxiety, failure, etc.) doesn’t mean we always will. It posits that we are forced to travel through the deep, dark woods many times in our lives and we may not always be lucky. I’ve seen and heard about this kind of idea before, that evil only needs one bad day to take over the world, so the story isn’t super startling in its message for me.

            But it is startling in its presentation. I hope that there are more books like this in the future, I really like this form of horror. It instills a sense of hopelessness and frequently contains less than likable protagonists, but it is so much better to me than poorly written, emotionally cruel stories that I see in modern horror movies and TV shows like American Horror Story and

Black Mirror. That stuff doesn’t interest me. Graphic novels like this, fascinate me.

The book was Great. I hope that this is just the beginning of Emily Carroll's work in making us all feel uncomfortable and frightened. 

(I thought I would include the below video, it is a song by They Might Be Giants and it exemplifies the specific paranoid horror that I enjoy. If you liked Through the Woods, I think you'll like this) 

Emily Carroll has written and illustrated “Through the woods”. She co-wrote “It’s a Mystery: Tales of Intrigue” and she wrote “His Face all Red” and “Out of Skin”. You can buy her books at https://www.amazon.com/Emily-Carroll/e/B00J0VG58G/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1 or at https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3447947.Emily_Carroll. I hope you enjoyed this review, thanks for reading and please have a good day!