In Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 gothic novel Rebecca, a young woman marries a wealthy widower, Maxim de Winter, only to discover – too late! – that he and his household are haunted by the memory of his first wife, its title character. The book is, famously, a tale of jealousy and the tricks it may play on the mind, bending it out of shape. But it’s also about power. Rebecca’s narrator, the second Mrs de Winter, isn’t only (at first) timid and naive; she’s also a possession, a wife whose real name we will never learn.
Emily Carroll’s new graphic novel, A Guest in the House, comes with a heady whiff of Rebecca. Abby (we do know her name) is a quiet, rather passive and somewhat solitary young woman, who lives in a small Canadian town, where she has a job on a supermarket checkout. When the book begins, she’s getting used to a new life, having married quite suddenly David, a widower who moved to the town to work as a dentist. There are things about this arrangement that she likes, in her strange, acquiescent way. It’s fun to play house after so long alone and theirs sits by a beautiful lake, surrounded by trees. But in other ways, her existence is now much more complicated. Not only will Abby have to learn to love Crystal, her husband’s young daughter; she’ll have to learn to love him, too: a man for whom she feels next to nothing physically and about whose previous life she knows dangerously little.
A Guest in the House, as its titles implies, is the story of a haunting; a woman rising up in the dead of the night to spill her secrets. How did David’s first wife die, and what happened to her paintings (she was an artist) and all her other possessions? Can it be true that everything was lost in a devastating fire? The spectre of her predecessor soon begins to taunt Abby. First, it brings distrust of her husband and then rank suspicion. More questions. Why does he choose to live on a lake if he doesn’t like to swim? Why does it make him so nervous every time Crystal goes near the water? With his luxuriant moustache and opaque glasses, behind which his eyes can never be seen, David is a horrible combination of plastic bonhomie and hair-trigger anger. Whenever he appears, we flinch. We’ve seen movies like this. We know the type.
It’s almost a decade since Carroll published her Eisner award-winning collection of comic horror stories, Through the Woods, and it’s good to have her back; her gothic imagination and instinct for plot combining to make pages – sometimes monochrome and sometimes bright scarlet – that are always involving and often rather beautiful. For me, the ending of A Guest in the House is too perfunctory; the book seems to finish before it should, with too many questions left unanswered. It’s frustrating. But the route there, part Betty Friedan and part Du Maurier, is masterful. If the mind is an attic, it’s sometimes best to leave its door firmly closed.
• A Guest in the House by Emily Carroll is published by Faber (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
