asri | Emily Carroll: Beneath the Dead Oak Tree

Beneath the Dead Oak Tree is poetic horror comic of 28 pages (the PDF has 32 overall) by Emily Carroll, published in 2018 by ShortBox. The story is set in a society of aristocratic anthropomorphic foxes and is told from a first-person narrator. She is courted by someone who is considered a highly attractive bachelor. He asks her to meet him in the night beneath the dead oak tree. It is there that the horror begins to unfold.

The art is delicious. Elegant party foxes, luscious gowns. Leafless trees beneath an eerie sky. For the party scenes Carroll uses a palette of reds and pinks for the background and the crowd, offsetting the light green and orange of the main characters. At the first party, his dress almost matches her fur color, and at the second, her dress almost matches his fur color. In the nightly woods it all turns grey, black, white beneath the full moon. Few pages are subdivided into panels (and they feel ripped out of time, which works extremely well for me). The page compositions are great! (I keep returning to the striking page 9 which seems so simple and is done so cleverly to great effect.)

And the text. ShortBox describes the comic as poem/folksong which feels apt. Loose verse, plain rhymes, and stark imagery: „The night was inky meat that night, the moon a swollen bone…“ There‘s a lot of blood pulsing in those words.

But don‘t just look for the blood when you read it. Watch out for the tears.

Look. See?

https://www.shortbox.co.uk/product/beneath-the-dead-oak-tree-by-emily-carroll

http://www.emcarroll.com/

Beneath the Dead Oak Tree is currently available digitally as Pay-What-You-Want product (along some other shortbox products) via gumroad.com/shortbox