A Guest in the House

by Emily Carroll

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A wild visual adventure packed with twists, turns and a haunting, at times terrifying, atmosphere that never lets up. This is a character study, a horror story and a slice of life all baked into one irresistible package. Good luck not getting hooked.

New York Times' Notable Book of 2023
Winner of the 2024 LA Times Book Prize

In Emily Carroll's haunting adult graphic novel horror story A Guest in the House, a young woman marries a kind dentist only to realize that there’s a dark mystery surrounding his former wife’s death.

After many lonely years, Abby’s just gotten married. She met her new husband—a recently widowed dentist—when he arrived in town with his young daughter, seeking a new start. Although it’s strange living in the shadow of her predecessor, Abby does her best to be a good wife and mother. But the more she learns about her new husband’s first wife, the more things don’t add up. And Abby starts to wonder . . . was Sheila’s death really by natural causes? As Abby sinks deeper into confusion, Sheila’s memory seems to become a force all its own, ensnaring Abby in a mystery that leaves her obsessed, fascinated, and desperately in love for the first time in her life.

Emily's masterful balance of black and white, surreal colors, rich textures, and dramatic lettering is assured to bring this story to life and give readers a chill up their spine as they read.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250255525
Publisher:	First Second
Publication date:	08/15/2023
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	9,051
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.60(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Emily Carroll is the writer and artist of numerous award-winning comics, both online and in print. Her debut horror comics collection, Through the Woods, won both the Eisner Award and the British Fantasy Award in 2014. Recent work includes When I Arrived at the Castle from Koyama Press, a baroque horror story dealing with lust and addiction, and a graphic novel adaptation of Laurie Halse Anderson's novel Speak. She is also known for the short comics she posts on her website. Emily lives in Stratford, Ontario, Canada, with two dogs and her wife, artist Kate Craig.

Editorial Reviews

04/10/2023

Echoes of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca abound in this fantastic and frightening graphic novel from Eisner Award winner Carroll (Through the Woods). Quiet convenience store clerk Abby has just recently married David, an older dentist and single father to Crystal. David’s first wife, Sheila, died tragically. In something of an oft-used horror trope, Crystal has been seeing and drawing pictures of Sheila, and before long, Abby herself begins seeing a spirit identifying itself as Sheila. At first the specter appears creature-like before morphing into a beautiful princess from a fairy tale Abby used to read as a child—the same tale Crystal is reading now. To say any more about the story risks diluting its thrills and chills; the narrative takes readers to places both familiar and shockingly not. What’s most remarkable is Carroll’s phantasmagoric artwork, at once mesmerizing and teeth-clenchingly macabre, like Miyazaki gone goth. Almost every page is a dreamscape in which, like the hallways of a wondrous house, one might not mind getting lost. Personality-wise the characters are a bit milquetoast—Abby perhaps purposefully so—but Carroll’s linework and coloring render them in shades melancholy, whimsical, and sinister. While the ending might invite more questions than answers, the wild turns taken and the dazzling visuals make this one scary good. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Listed in the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2023

"What makes Carroll's work such a compelling read are the visuals, which are consistently surprising and expertly move from one stylistic tactic to the next, each creating its own particular mood. A Guest in the House' rests on atmosphere, delivering an uncanny, wild ride."—NPR

"Carroll brings her deliciously disquieting style to this gothic tale of a new marriage and the sinister secrets lurking beneath the veneer of cozy domesticity."—Booklist, starred review

“Emily Carroll is the master of comics horror, we can only thank whoever blessed/cursed her with the gift to creep under the skin and thrill with visceral image as only she can. Reading A Guest In The House is to feel small and sad and longing, but curious, sensual, forbidden - then terrified, trapped, racing to an end you can't look away from. I loved it, of course I did!!” — Kate Beaton, creator of Ducks

“With the hypnotically brilliant A Guest in the House, phantasmagoria meets family psychodrama. I’m left agape and haunted, and wanting more.” —Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World and The Pallbearers Club

“Carroll brings her trademark sensual grotesquerie to this deep character study, braiding the gristly threads of a woman’s everyday mundanity with a lush and sordidly brutal dreamscape. As melancholic and erotic collide, A Guest in the House evolves into a modern horror masterpiece.” —Sloane Leong, cocreator of Graveneye

"It is a story about the past—a primordial horror...Much of Carroll’s work so far, including what follows in A Guest in the House, suggests that she, too, might find stillness in viscera." —Porespect Magazine

"While the ending might invite more questions than answers, the wild turns taken and the dazzling visuals make this one scary good"—Publisher's Weekly

From the Publisher