This was just wow. The art was perfection. It was creepy, strange, disturbing, and beautiful.
I felt unsettled when I finished it.
5/5 stars.

A Guest in the House by Emily Carroll ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫/5
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Abby has lucked out, she believes, in marrying a small town dentist and moving in with him and his daughter in a quiet house on the lake. But peace starts to slowly rot away exposing hidden secrets about her new husband and his ex-wife and Abby is left with more questions than answers.
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This adult horror graphic novel has a haunting story, BEAUTIFUL illustration (also very scary at times), and major creeps and twists. I would have given it 5 stars but the ending definitely didn’t make sense to me? Maybe I’m a dummy? Maybe there will be a part two??
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Thank you NetGalley!

This is a gorgeous, cinematic graphic novel. The blending of the art styles is brilliant and Carroll has such a way with framing, color, and dialogue. The building of the tension is so delicious and spooky. I felt a bit let down by the ambiguity of the ending, which felt more unfinished than intentional, but it was such a beautiful story otherwise!

Intriguing.

I was able to get a forward copy of this thanks to NetGalley, and I was so excited to read it. I have loved Emily Carroll's horror since the early days of Tumblr, and was so very excited to continue to read her work.

This book was a suspenseful ride from start to finish, and the ending leaves me... very confused. I very deeply hope that there will be deep dives and theory posts throughout the internet about that ending. It's not what you suspect (Because I was wrong, I'll tell you my theory was that everyone was a ghost. Just. <a href="https://imgflip.com/i/7u1w11"><img src="https://i.imgflip.com/7u1w11.jpg" title="made at imgflip.com"/></a><div><a href="https://imgflip.com/memegenerator">from Imgflip Meme Generator</a></div>).

The art is, as always, stunning, with changes from a very standard black-and-white comic to looking similar to the classic books from the early 1900's but with colors that pop and swirl. Also, as always with Carroll's work, the grotesque and the mundane are intertwined beautifully, creating jumpscares throughout the book that leave your heart pounding.

The story itself is something that could easily go stale, but I don't think did. A woman who is the second wife of a man and who is kind of having a bit of a Yellow Wallpaper moment in the summer. Abby speaks as though she is not human, or as though she has not experienced much of humanity, and in a way, that seems to be her ultimate flaw: She is naive to the point that she believes anything she is told and does not ask questions. Because of this, she is easily influenced. All of this makes the ending all the more confusing. I think I will have to read this again when it comes out, because the right-hook of an ending, the out-of-left-field of it all, is what made me give it four stars instead of 5. Too much is left unexplained (Why did she completely forget/imagine the ending of Sir Gallypig? Which of the three things ACTUALLY happened? If those weren't true... why did Crystal have the issue with her drawings? There's just too many questions that the ending actually creates rather than solves.)

It was great, I'll read it again and I recommend it, but it may take multiple read throughs.

Dark and beautiful, Carroll's latest work recalls both Bluebeard and various 50's house on the lake murder stories. The book is beautiful, which is almost a statement of fact given the author's talent.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC!

The good: I LOVE the art style. It's gorgeous, evocative, and totally creepy. Especially the colored pages. The art itself makes the book worth taking a glance at, at least.

The less-good: Way too ambiguous ending for my taste. I'm all for endings that require a little bit of inference, but I didn't feel like I had anything to infer from! There's some cool threads running through the story that just fray and fall apart in a fairy unsatisfactory way. Also, I had a digital copy that had pretty blurry text. I imagine that will be fixed in the official release but it made it somewhat frustrating to read.

Really enjoyed this book from one of my favorite artists! The plot resembles Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca, but it becomes very different throughout the book. The art is simply stunning. Carroll uses primarily black and white with splashes of color in her work. In her other works, she uses red, but here she uses several different colors including bright neon. I loved the rural Canadian setting as well.

I am docking it a star though, mostly because I'm disappointed in the quality of the eARC. The comic was not scanned at a high quality and the text was impossible to read at times, because of the low pixelization.

I love Emily Carroll's work so much. It always ends with as many questions as answers, leaving it up to the reader to decide how to interpret what they've just read. The symbolism and the strategic use of color are classic Carroll, and the art is a riviting blend of beauty and horror. Simply perfection. A haunted, horrible perfectoin of queer longing and the pain of being entrapped in a life you were always told you were supposed to want.

I've loved Emily Carroll's eerie, mysterious, uncomfortable comics ever since I ran across His Face All Red online — that final panel, with its unanswerable question and its sheer horror, is burned into my brain. Her longer-form stories play out in similar ways, with characters who get lost in their own heads sometimes, and confront questions about the world they can't answer — questions that the world isn't particularly quick to help them unravel. A Guest in the House is the latest of these horror comics, about a passive woman, her mercurial husband, and the defensive, sullen child they have to raise together, in spite of a force that keeps bringing up new and disturbing information.

The running imagery here, where the protagonist, a chubby and self-hating woman named Abby, visualizes herself as a lean and active armored knight, slaying dragons in vivid color, then lives out her days in timid black and white, is a fascinating and apt way of communicating the contrast between her secret inner life and the one she shares with other people. But those fantasies are also the kind of horror visuals Carroll specializes in — dripping with gore that's disturbingly beautiful and phantasmagorical. It's a solid metaphor, but with particularly gorgeous execution.

And the slow-burn character work, as the reader slowly starts to understand Abby and her family, and as sympathies keep shifting and sliding with each new interaction, is extremely satisfying and disturbing. There's a lot going on in the spaces between them, and as usual with Carroll's work, it isn't simple and straightforward, or easy to track or label.

I suspect there'll be a lot of questions out there when readers get to the end of this one. There's a lot to unpack — it's the kind of story where you want to immediately circle back to the beginning and read it all over again with completely new eyes. I'm looking forward to other people reading this one.

Carroll, Emily. A Guest in the House, 15 Aug. 2023.
Horror is officially for the girls. Chock-full of classic spookfest tropes like body horror, hauntings, and forbidden (read: queer) desire, A Guest in the House is also a commentary on the continuing oppression of women in the private domestic sphere. Protagonist Abby is an unfulfilled, uninspired, almost-stay-at-home second wife to a successful older doctor and stepmom to a bereaved preteen. As she struggles to fit into her new role as domestic goddess and unpaid domestic labourer, Abby begins to suspect something more sinister than her own unhappiness may be at play in the grand lakeside house she can’t ever quite feel comfortable in. As her husband says, all big lakes have “got bodies in ‘em.”
It’s clear from page one that something isn’t right in this home. Abbey digs deeper and deeper, despite her increasingly surreal and vividly-coloured dreams, where she hacks and slices through thick jungle in a shining suit of armor to reach the sometimes-beautiful, sometimes-grotesque spirit that lives in the house or in her mind (or both). Against the black and white art that depicts Abbey’s everyday existence, these dreamscapes are equal parts thrilling and disturbing. After all, what’s a girl to do when she’s got the hots for her husband’s dead first wife - especially when that same wife may be trying to kill her?
(CW may be needed for discussions of suicide and emotional abuse)

This was a really quick read and I enjoyed the illustrations and the parallel story of the knight and the princess. I don’t think the characters were particularly developed and I wanted to see more between David and Abby since we get the impression that he’s very manipulative and yet so distant. I enjoyed the gothic style of the house having hidden/secret spaces that this madwoman inhabits. I don’t think I would read this again.

No one does horror graphic novels better than Emily Carroll. Unsettling, unexpected, but with a side of absolutely stunning artwork. It’ll probably take me a few more reads to fully figure out what happened here but I am definitely creeped out.

I'm a longtime admirer of Emily Carroll's work; her art and terrifying stories have always been highlights in the horror genre. "A Guest in the House" follows a well-trod path: new wife, who's a little awkward and unsure of her place in the family, a mysterious and mercurial husband, the feeling of isolation... and possibly a haunting... but of course Carroll takes it in a new and frightening direction. The art is topnotch, the subtext is fabulous, and I'll be thinking of this little tale for a long while. Recommended to anyone who wants a frightening but thoughtful graphic novel to enjoy.

If the Yellow Wallpaper got a modern, graphic novel update, it would be this book. Utterly terrifying gorgeously illustrated.

So, big thanks to Ms. Carroll, First Second books and Net Galley for the ARC.

I didn’t know what to expect when I picked it up. It looked beautiful and it is. The use of color or not color or both, is exceptional. The way that Carroll moves in and out of styles adds to the dreamy, creepy, quality of this book.

I can’t help but feel that this is a deconstruction of Jane Eyre. I am not a big fan of that book because, you know, creepy old man who bangs the baby sitter while having his wife locked in the attic and lying about her death, not my thing. I don’t find it romantic and that is what I see here. The story itself is one worth visiting over and over and I think Carroll’s take on it is one of the most original I’ve seen in a long time. She doesn’t give the creepy old man a pass. He isn’t a romantic hero. He is a gaslighting villain who manipulates a poor, young woman, just like this story.

I'm a big fan of Through the Woods, but this just left me deeply confused. The digital ARC was really blurry in the areas that were brightly colored, so I wasn't sure what exactly was going on. I'm so confused by the ending. I generally enjoy books with unreliable narrators but the author didn't set up enough hints along the way to make the ending satisfying or comprehensible.

A beautifully tense haunted house story filled with gorgeous illustrations, A Gust in The House follows Abby attempting to navigate her marriage and the past that comes with it. With a secretive husband and a haunted house, nothing is as it seems. I sat and read this in one sitting because I had to know what was going to happen, the tension grows with every page. The majority of the story is told in black and white, which makes the color scenes even more vibrant and eye-catching. The whole story is somewhat ambiguous but I know that this is a story that I will be thinking about for a long time. Thanks to Netgalley and First Second for the ARC!

Absolutely phenomenal art style, beautiful haunting story but the end was not really my style I hope there will maybe be a sequel to tie everything together.

I sat down to start A Guest in the House and I did not get up until it was done. Emily Carroll has been hands down my favorite illustrator since I first picked up Through the Woods. It's amazing to see Carroll's work develop to the point of A Guest in the House. This is exactly the kind of haunted house story everyone should read, like Rebecca meets The Haunting of Hill House in monochrome spotted with brilliant gushes of color. Abby's struggle to get out under the weight of her lakeside house's history and the secrets her husband keeps from her is stunning, devastating, and so gripping that the whole read became the best possible and most haunting blur possible.

I thought it was decent until the end???? I’m all for artsy/ambiguous endings, but I have NO IDEA what that was

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC