Starred Review ALA Booklist

Starred Review A wealthy young woman weds a man in a lonely old house, and at night she hears a forlorn song of unavenged murder lilting from the walls. A girl spends the summer with her brother and his fiancée, who is not what she seems. Three sisters wait for their father to return, but one by one they disappear with a tall man in a broad-brimmed hat. All the tales in Carroll's debut graphic novel are fairly standard ghost stories, but it is her eerie illustrations pping with bold color on black, glossy pages at masterfully build terrifying tension and a keep-the-lights-on atmosphere. With cantilevered perspectives and dark inky splotches speckling the corners, the spooky images of stark forests, gaping caves, bloodshot eyes, and ominous shadows are brilliantly married to the text printed in manic handwritten fonts, some crazed and swirling, others coldly deadpan. The best ghost stories make great use of dramatic tension, and Carroll is no slouch here, either: she amplifies the scariness of the stories ll of ghosts, murder, and monsters th startling page turns revealing grotesque, squeal-inducing images. A wonderful heir to the legacy of Alvin Schwartz and Stephan Gammell's iconic Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (1981).

School Library Journal Starred Review (Tue Jul 01 00:00:00 CDT 2014)

Gr 8 Up-Not exactly a book of fairy tales, these illustrated short stories are more a series of ruminations interwoven with dreams and fairy tales. Classic elements are here—there's a girl in a red hooded cloak, and a girl who wears a ribbon around her throat—but the entries expand and wander in different (and darker) directions. The illustrations (done in ink and graphite on Bristol board and then digitally colored) fill the entire page, so at first glance the work looks more like a picture book than a graphic novel. The hues are bold and striking, with the color red dominating the pages in the form of sunsets, flushed cheeks, bloodshot eyes, twisted word balloons, a deep crimson ruby, and even pools of blood. This collection contains four new stories and one ("His Face All Red") that was originally published as a webcomic on Carroll's website. This is a beautifully rendered but deeply chilling collection of vignettes that will be most appreciated by teens and adults who are fans of fairy tales, horror, and the things that hide in the dark. A delight for Edgar Allan Poe and Alvin Schwartz enthusiasts.— Andrea Lipinski, New York Public Library

Horn Book

Five unsettling tales in graphic-novel format are inspired by common folkloric themes--from wolves in the woods to peculiar visitors to dark possessions. Carroll experiments with the uncanny, burrowing inside the reader's mind and twisting what should be safe into something startlingly strange. Swirling, chaotic, hand-lettered, and ink-smudged illustrations (at times reminiscent of Stephen Gammell) bring each grisly story to life.

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

Canadian graphic artist Carroll uses familiar horror motifs-the first wife's ghost, the monster that dwells in the forest-to create fresh and disturbing tales. Sure in her handling of line, color, and sequential art techniques, she revels in period settings, placing her five stories in identifiable historical eras that include colonial North America and the Roaring Twenties. Carefully drawn clothing and furnishings provide ironic backdrops for Lovecraftian revelations of parasitical possession and hideous evil. In the most explicitly gruesome story, a dowdy girl named Mabel is forced to stay with her prosperous brother and his perfect wife, who, Mabel begins to see, is a monster inhabiting the skin of a human: "I only wanted to wear her," the wife says dreamily of the housekeeper, whose bloodied wrist Mabel has spotted, "but when I tried her on, there was no stretch left." Instead of the gratifying defeat of evil, the gothic stories often leave off unsettlingly with a twist of the knife, just at the moment some fresh horror beckons. Ages 14-up. Agent: Jen Linnan, Linnan Literary Management. (July)