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When I Arrived At My Opinions About The Castle

It's tough to feel horror and suspense while drinking my first coffee of the day, but Emily Carroll's (Speak, Through The Woods) When I Arrived At The Castle managed it. I read …Castle for the second time that Monday morning, and still felt that horror and suspense despite knowing the end.

I thought almost immediately of Becky Cloonan's Wolves, because both stories are so compact, and the reveals compel the reader to read again. The stories are superficially similar (main characters set off to kill a monster), but that's about it. Carrol's larger page count allows for a richness and a couple more twists than Wolves carries.

And then there's …Castle's carnality. It couldn't work without the flirting, the weighted sentences in the present tense. The monster luxuriates in their shapeshifting skin. I'd prefer not to contribute to the long history of men writing terribly about erotic elements, so I'll leave it there. Carroll introduces the monster by having her/them bend over a second floor railing to greet the entering protagonist. (I saw it first in a noir flick, but which one escapes me. I'm sure someone in film school can help me out here.) While not tremendously erotic, the sharp two sentences of "Her nails glittered. The backs of ten scuttling beetles." were particularly impressive.

By the end of the graphic novella blood falls by the bucketload. The promised violence arrives. It's the third or fourth read that I notice the little touches, like the raining blood outside the castle as foreshadowing. In this way, Carroll's work feels ancient and gothic, like, say, a castle.

The end result, when looking at the .pdf file, reads like a stiff old leather-bound volume. There's a keyhole scene. There's a monster that doesn't immediately jump to murder the protagonist. There's a castle with endless halls, and too many doors. There's paintings that watch the characters. While reading, I felt like I ought to keep a snifter of brandy at arm's length.

Absent the erotic elements, When I Arrived At The Castle is a fun romp in genre. The well-executed eroticism only improves it.

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