While I appreciate getting this ARC I don’t think this was for me. Unfortunately the ebook version of this is super blurry which takes away a lot from the sorry and frankly makes the text hard to read. This is the second book by this author that I read and I have come to the conclusion that their work just isn’t for me.

Thank you to NetGalley and First Second Books for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review!
*Contains Spoilers*



3/5 stars
The Good:
The colored images were amazingly done! I was very invested in the story, even if I was frustrated with the main character, until the very end. There was so much potential for the twists that the story took.

The Not So Good:
I like an ending the makes you think, retrace bread crumbs, but the ending did not make sense. I've spend all evening turning it over, reading other reviews, and the mass consensus is that it is either unfinished or it just doesn't make sense. I hope to check reviews after publication to see if anyone really does understand what happened.
The ebook text was blurry and very hard to read, but this will probably be fixed when published.

This is my first book from Emily Carroll and I had heard wonderful things, so I was excited to receive an advanced copy of A Guest in the House.

The artwork alternates between black and white, with splashes of vivid color. This was a very effective narrative tool and really enjoyed most of the art throughout the story.

Unfortunately the story didn't quite live up to the great artwork. It follows a young, shy housewife named Abby who is slowly bonding with her new stepdaughter while living a monotonous life in a beautiful lakeside home. The stepdaughter claims she has seen her mother, who died (under increasingly mysterious circumstances) and Abby begins to see a ghostly presence in the house.

There were a lot of confusing aspects to the story, and I'm all for ambiguity, but the story literally didn't have an ending. Overall I thought it was underwhelming and just okay.

A graphic novel reminiscent of Rebecca that fans of ND Stevenson and Tillie Walden who also love horror genre would love.

Abby, a grocery clerk turned wife and stepmom, finds solace in daydreams of being a knight. Her stepdaughters' eerie drawings lead her to uncover the truth behind the passing of the first wife and mother. The fast-paced, eerie story alternates between black-and-white reality and a vibrant, 50s animation-like illustrations of the knight's world.

3.5 Stars (Rounded Down).

Abby marries her recently widowed dentist of a husband, and they and his daughter from his first marriage move to a new house on a lake. Abby and her stepdaughter Crystal "see" the dead wife/mother, and Abby starts to question how the woman, Sheila, actually died. Was it cancer like her new husband told her? Author Emily Carroll created a mostly black and white graphic novel, with a few colors thrown in when an important aspect occurs.

This graphic novel was quick and to the point. I think it left out a lot that I really desired in terms of plot. The ending kind of left the reader unsure what really happened. I am hoping the loose ends are just to make way for a part 2 of A Guest in the House. I hope it is either that, or there will be more editing in the released copy.

I really hated the main character, Abby. She was weak and did not question anything. What woman would marry a stranger and not question or want to see what is in a locked room in her new house? Her new husband was a jerk the whole time, but she was fine with that and not bonding with her new stepdaughter, just as long as she has a home where she doe not have to contribute to the household? If I married a person that whisked me away to a new lake house (and that person does not even like swimming), I would question a lot. I would want to know about the previous wife and how she died. It seemed Abby was too much of a weak pushover for me to have any sympathy for. I would have loved more character and story development, but maybe Carroll's style is just not for me. The premise was great, I just wanted more.

I read Through the Woods about four years ago and remember that I quite enjoyed the artwork, but the stories themselves were hit or miss for me. Unfortunately, that remains true with A Guest in the House.

Emily Carroll's artwork is very distinct, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, despite the grainy quality of the eARC. The plain black and white style matched the apparent normality of Abby's life with her husband and step-daughter. It also served as a fantastic contrast to the fantastical colored pages sprinkled throughout the book. Those colors were absolutely stunning and I would love to see them in a printed edition. The horror is conveyed perfectly when Carroll draws her ghosts, from the hauntingly beautiful to the chillingly grotesque. I loved the contrast between the princess ghost and the drowned ghost. These images will not be leaving my mind anytime soon.

The story was lacking and, for the most part, confusing to me. I understood parts, but then other parts felt underdeveloped and incomplete, especially the end. I just couldn't really get invested in the storyline, and the only thing I was curious about was what really happened to Sheila. The rest, I didn't really care about.

This is a relatively short read and has a lot packed into it. The stunning color artwork is why I can give this three stars, as the story just didn't totally grip me and left me more confused than anything.

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.