Through the Woods: Stories by Emily Carroll.
Title: Through the Woods: Stories.
Author: Emily Carroll.
Genre: Fiction, graphic novel, short stories, horror, fantasy.
Country: Canada.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2014.
Summary: A collection of 6 horror stories. In Our Neighbor's House, three little girls are left alone in a remote winter cabin when their father doesn't come back from hunting, and, haunted by a menacing dark creature, they one-by-one set out to seek help. In A Lady's Hands Are Cold, a young woman taken to an isolated castle after an arranged marriage begins to be haunted by what she quickly discovers is the ghost of the last mistress of the house. In His Face All Red, a man is horrified to see his brother come back from the forest, knowing full well he had recently killed him in a jealous rage. In My Friend Janna, a young woman helps her friend fool people into thinking she's a medium who commune with the dead, but she slowly comes to realize her friend herself is haunted by something horrific. In The Nesting Place, a girl visiting her brother and his new wife from boarding school begins to suspect her new sister-in-law is actually a nesting monster. In In Conclusion, a little girl gets through the forest safely and avoids the wolf, this time.
My rating: 7.5/10
My review:
♥
♥ My sisters were wrong about one thing: while the brim of his hat is very wide, and while he does smile (indeed, it looks impossible for him to do anything else), it is obvious, just at a glance, HE IS NO MAN.
~~Our Neighbor's House.
♥ ..she was awoken by a soft, sad song.
I married my love in the springtime, but by summer he'd locked me away.
It's cold where I am and so lonely, but in loneliness I will remain,
Unloved, unavenged, & forgotten, until I am whole once again.
♥
Then arranged the limbs on the floor, bound together with red ribbon.
♥
~~A Lady's Hands Are Cold.
♥ This man is not my brother.
My brother has a cottage with a hawthorne tree and a lilac bush, and a plump young wife with starry eyes. My brother has a fine coat, a vest the color of moss, and a way with people that makes them trust him.
This man has all these things (and my brother's face). (His handsome face).
But just last week... I killed my brother.
♥ Instead, people thanked me, even as they consoled me, I was given my brother's animals, and I slept, dreaming of nothing. But three days later my brother came from the woods. (Most strange things do.)
~~His Face All Red.
♥
My friend Janna used to speak to the dead.
♥
My friend Janna is haunted.
I'm not sure if it's by a ghost. I've never seen a ghost before. Never even claimed to. But this thing I see... and Janna doesn't.
♥
~~My Friend Janna.
♥
Bell's mother told her about monsters.
She told her of the man-shaped thing that lurked in the cellar of her childhood home. How its bone-white face, with its piano key teeth and burnt-out eyes, would peer up from the bottom of the steps.
"The adults never heard a sound though, and never believed us when we spoke of the creature's sweet, wet voice."
She spoke of the dark fog that seeped over their town years ago... and of the thousand mouths it hid. Rings of the teeth that glinted at the edge of one's vision.
"The last time I saw your father he was reaching for me, half swallowed in that mist..."
But the worst kind of monster was the burrowing kind. The sort that crawled into you and made a home there. The sport you couldn't name, the sort you couldn't see. The monster that ate you alive from the inside out.
Bell never believed a word.
♥
♥
~~The Nesting Place.
♥
It was a fine, fine night & a good, good walk.
♥ And once she was in bed, she said:
"What a fine night! What a good walk! I knew the wolf wouldn't find me!"
"Oh, but you just travel through those woods again & again..." said a shadow at the window. "...and you must be lucky to avoid the wold every time... But the wolf... the wolf only needs enough luck to find you once."
~~In Conclusion.