Hauntings of Bodies, Selves, and Houses

A Comparative Reading of Three of Emily Carroll’s Short Horror Comic Stories

Abstract

This essay examines how the themes of domesticity, gender, and the function of bodies within the horrific realms of haunted domiciles function in three of comic and graphic novel author Emily Carroll’s short graphic horror stories. The essay discusses the short digital horror comic “All Along the Wall” (2014), as well as the short horror comics “A Lady’s Hands are Cold” and “The Nesting Place,” both published in Carroll’s 2014 collection Through the Woods. Each of these stories presents the reader with a ghost and/or haunting that has an unconventional relationship to corporeality, as well as with a female protagonist who is preyed upon in a domestic setting.