Book Review by G,M,E Burchett-Vass- "A Guest in the House' by Emily Carroll

Emily Carroll – A Guest in the House

Carroll writes and illustrates horror comics, and is the author of Through the Woods, a collection of shorter horror stories, and When I Arrived at the Castle, a lesbian vampire comic. Carroll’s latest book is A Guest in the House, published in 2023 and winner of the Lambda Literary Award in 2024.

I cannot recommend Carroll’s work enough. The stories are nasty, grotesque, and hugely unsettling, everything one could wish for from a horror comic. A Guest in the House tells the story of Abby, wife to David and step-mother to Crystal. Crystal’s absent mother is Sheila, who haunts Abby in a manner similar to that of Du Maurier’s eponymous heroine Rebecca, from the story which is an ur-text of the Female Gothic genre. Abby herself, a self-effacing half-presence, makes for a splendid version of the nameless second wife of Max de Winter.

To the outside world, Abby is a quiet and introverted young woman, but her vibrant internal world gradually encroaches on the narrative, reinforced by the book’s colour scheme which (mostly) shows the everyday world in monochrome, and Abby’s flights of fancy in brilliant, gory colour. Abby is what critics would term an unreliable narrator, and when the denouement comes, the reader is forced to confront the extent to which they have been duped. Unreliable narrators are ubiquitous in film and prose literature, of course, and it is a narratorial technique that is perhaps even more effective when the narrative is rendered in images. The reader is not simply creating images in their head conjured from prose – no, they are looking at fully complete images which they believe to be a true picture of the narrative taking place, and somehow these fully rendered images are harder to shake off.

see more of their work here - https://www.emcarroll.com/