ABSTRACT
With her Eisner-winning graphic short story collection Through the Woods (2014), Canadian writer and artist Emily Carroll has quickly established herself as a new maven of horror comics. One key element of her collection is the portrayal of feeding, biting, and chewing as the primary vectors of horror. In this chapter, we explore how, in Through the Woods, eating can mark one as monstrous and Other. This process of becoming an Other through food and eating can be linked to Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject, since the Other, like the abject, disturbs borders and identity. Food horror in particular disturbs by displaying horrific foods and showing the act of eating the forbidden.
Focusing on two particular stories (“A Lady’s Hands Are Cold” and “The Nesting Place”), we explore the multifaceted interactions between horror, food, and fairy tales in Carroll’s work. We underline specific moments in which consumption is conceptualized as neither neutral nor mundane but as a warning that important boundaries are being crossed. Finally, we also argue that Carroll’s emphasis on food and eating as a source of horror comes directly from her choice of the fairy tale as a primary mode of storytelling.
