Emily Carroll’s new graphic novel plays on our deepest fears
Emily Carroll’s new graphic novel, A Guest in the House, is an involving, beautifully plotted study of the madness of isolation, steeped in the tropes of fairy tale and horror. And, as all good fairy tales do, it confidently deals in the imagery of the unconscious. Narrated via an innovative combination of text and cinematic, sweeping illustration, it concerns the boundaries of the imagination, and the dynamics of a small family as it threatens to fall apart. Abby is a young wife, listless and bored, who has married an older man (David, a normal kind of guy, with that most humdrum of jobs: dentistry). The setting, depicted with haunting precision in muted tones, is 1990s Canada.
