A Guest in the House by Emily Carroll Review

Abby is the new and younger second wife to David, the local dentist. But she’s finding the transition to married life and being a stepmom to David’s daughter Crystal, difficult. And then she starts seeing… things… in her otherwise charming lakeside house, and finds out she’s been told lies about David’s first wife, Sheila. How did Sheila die - and what do the lighthouse and the lake have to do with it? The house’s nightly guest has some disturbing answers…

A Guest in the House is Emily Carroll’s latest and longest story to date and, as usual, it’s a gothic horror fairy tale-flavoured comic. I like her shorter stories better than this one, especially as it feels very slight on the story for a 240 page book, as if she teased out what would’ve worked fine as a short story into a much longer one and lost the narrative pacing in the process.

You get a clue as to what’s happening early on when Abby fantasises about ripping her throat out with her hands. Even so, I still found the ending to be quite surprising and easily the best part of the story - I wish the ending had happened sooner and then we got more story after that, rather than finishing things as soon as it got interesting!

The unpredictable ending is in part thanks to Carroll’s skilful misdirection. Knowing her previous comics, and the mystery over David’s ex, I was anticipating a modern day retelling of Bluebeard, but, to Carroll’s credit, it’s actually something more original.

Ending aside, the rest of the book is quite dull. Abby has the same dreams of knights and dragons and is a little bit nutty for some reason (repressed sexuality/undiagnosed depression?), David’s got secrets, and the spooky creature pops up now and then in different forms to feed into Abby’s increasingly unhinged thinking. This is the holding pattern for 90% of the book until the ending and I found it quite flat and unengaging for the most part. No idea why it was set in the 1980s either besides having the lack of the internet so Abby is unable to look up David’s ex’s details.

Carroll’s artwork isn’t bad but a lot of the book is in shades of black and white, matching Abby’s muted state of mind/the dreariness of the narrative and the imagery is often of mundane everyday stuff. There’s the occasional burst of colour and artistic flourish once the fantastical appears and the creature is definitely creepy, but the dazzling visuals Carroll’s capable of are unfortunately restrained for too much of the book.

Emily Carroll’s an excellent cartoonist but I found A Guest in the House to be underwhelming and often unexpectedly boring. I think her type of storytelling is better suited to the short story form rather than longer narratives like this - to that end, I would recommend her brilliant collection, Through the Woods, over this one, if you’ve not read it before.