Her preoccupation with the unreliability of human façade and veneer is as clear in When I Arrived at the Castle as in her shorter comics like “His Face All Red” and “Some Other Animal’s Meat”. Often in Carroll’s comics the “unknowable” figure initially masquerades as a person, but is revealed to be…not.
Mysteriously, this catlike young woman is already expected by the estate’s threateningly enigmatic, yet seductive Countess.Ĭentral to Carroll’s horror ethos is the seemingly facile trope that nothing is as it seems, but Carroll takes this a step further with her comics, which frequently border on cosmic horror with the implicit thesis that nothing is fully knowable. On a dark, rainy night, a visitor arrives on the doorstep of a foreboding castle. Somewhere betwixt Crimson Peak and The Bloody Chamber lies horror maestro Emily Carroll’s 2019 full-length comic When I Arrived at the Castle, an erotically charged gothic tale that evokes and pays homage to horror and fairytale conventions even as it subverts them.
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