“I can no longer sleep.

I have dreams.

His legs limp.

His face all red.

And twice I have woken 

and seen my brother

digging.

Is this guilt?

Or is this my brother, whole, not a double?

And if so…

Why won’t he turn to look at me?”

“His Face All Red”, a comic by Emily Carroll, follows the story of a man who murders his brother in the woods near their town, only to have him return alive and apparently unscathed three days later. The story is ambiguous about whether the “man” who returns truly is his brother, or if he is somehow connected to the mysterious beast who, up until recently, had been attacking the town’s livestock; but what is equally ambiguous is whether the protagonist himself is altogether trustworthy. The way the main character is portrayed throughout the story implies that he may be an unreliable narrator, and whether or not the reader decides to trust him shapes their interpretation of the events that follow.

From the beginning of the comic, the protagonist, who remains unnamed along with the rest of the characters, is portrayed as an outsider. In social settings he is always shown sitting off to the side by himself while his brother mingles, and he is never depicted with friends or companions of his own. When he first volunteers to hunt down the beast that has been threatening the village, the townspeople all laugh until his brother offers to go with him. It is never specified why the townspeople treat him this way, but it is clear that he does not hold their respect. The protagonist’s social isolation and probable low social status within his small village communicates that there may be something “off” about him that causes others to distance themselves.

Another hint is the paranoia the protagonist displays both before and after murdering his brother. When the pair first enters the forest to kill the beast, our main character describes passing a tree “with leaves that looked like ladies’ hands” and a stream “that sounded like dogs growling”, which his brother dismisses as simply a “common oak” and a “babbling brook”, respectively. The fact that he perceives these things as somehow vaguely threatening despite having lived next to this forest his whole life is strange to say the least – and quite telling of the protagonist’s mental state, not to mention the fact that he goes on to murder his brother without a second thought (and without changing his facial expression).

After he murders and disposes of his brother he claims that he “feared another attack”, which comes across as odd since his brother had already killed what he thought was the beast, and he himself had just killed his brother. Who does he think is going to attack him? At that point his brother had not returned from the woods, so it is unreasonable to assume that he’s afraid of his brother retaliating. These demonstrations of paranoia paints the protagonist as someone whose perceptions of things may not be entirely accurate.

Finally the twist ending – the main character finds that his brother’s body is still in the hole where he dumped it despite his brother having returned to the village safe and sound. This forces the reader to decide: is the protagonist crazy, or are there supernatural forces at work? It’s entirely possible that the “brother” the protagonist sees return to town is a manifestation of his own guilt over killing his brother in cold blood. Seeing that he never really interacted with the people around him all that often to begin with, it doesn’t seem implausible that he is imagining these events, where the townspeople rejoice at the return of his brother from the presumed grave, as a coping mechanism, and that his fantasy remains unchecked because of his very limited social interactions. Or, alternatively, he may never have killed his brother at all, and he only imagined that he did because of the intense jealousy he feels for him: the fact that his brother’s “corpse” appears to move at the end of the comic may be alluding to it being another one of his nightmarish perceptions of what is in actuality something commonplace. Either way, the comic makes a solid case for an unreliable narrator, which makes for a thought-provoking reading experience.

Em Carroll’s “MARGOT’S ROOM” is, first and foremost, a choose-your-own-adventure story (with the story leaning deeper into horror as the comic develops). From the first page, the reader is prompted with a poem and a choice: 

Aside from the immediate unease offered by the grisly scene presented by the first page of the comic, the necessity of the reader’s choice to engage and the “path” travelled by the scrolling patterns of the major contributors to the overall dread and horrific impact. The conceit of horror films and animated horror series is that you are being told a story; you passively accept the images, sounds, and dialogue of the tale, and your engagement is limited to your mere presence. Em Carroll, through her use of interactive choice and unpredictable scrolling, removes the passivity of the audience and forces them to choose to immerse themselves in the story and walk (with keystrokes) through the panels of the comic.

The entire story requires being actively unpacked by the reader to be told; once again, this aspect of MARGOT’S ROOM is one of the defining horror elements. The chapters that best display the interfacing of this narrative style and the scrolling involved in the comic are chapters V and II.

While very difficult to capture, we see that at this point in Chapter II there is a near-physical “drop” in the story. The reader has to adjust their scrolling, changing the orientation of the comic and providing a sense of dread at the literal descent in the narrative path – again, a descent that the reader chooses to follow, which heightens the suspense of the unfolding dialogue.

This combination of effects is felt the most in Chapter V, where the reader reaches the “climax” of the story. There are three more of the drops mentioned earlier, and following the trail of the panels is at its most difficult and unsettling in this chapter. The discordant movement of the story from panel to panel drags the reader further and further down the screen, at times losing them in the blackness of the background page until they manage to stumble upon another unsettling panel of the murder at the end of the story.  This physical element breaches one of the only sanctities found when regarding horror: the fact that you are completely disconnected, physically, from the story. Carroll’s uses of the discussed techniques creates deep intimacy between the story and the reader, allowing the comic to transcend the flat, distant nature of horror media.

Emily Carroll’s web-comic, His Face All Red, focuses on two main characters—the Narrator and his Brother. Neither is named in the story, therefore I have capitalized their titles for referencing purposes.

The Narrator immediately builds sympathy for the Brother by describing him as handsome and trustworthy, while painting himself as envious and unpopular. Due to an unreliable narrator, the only thing I can tell for certain what is true are his emotions, as his story may have untruthful elements pertaining to events and appearances. For example, it is not clear if when the characters pass by a tree and stream whether the descriptions are simple similaic descriptors, or if the trees and streams in this fictional world actually look and sound like that.

After the Narrator kills the Brother, he is celebrated for slaying the beast that was terrorizing the village and is given his Brother’s animals. He seems content here, as he notes he dreamt of nothing. One part of the story is that the Narrator is the only one who notices the Brother’s coat is not missing the piece he ripped from it. If the Narrator really did take a piece and show it to the townspeople for proof of his Brother’s death, why then was he the only one who noticed? I suppose everyone could have been too overcome with joy to notice for themselves. This is peculiar nonetheless.

The Narrator seeing the Brother at night digging could be a hallucination or an actual event, but at this point in the story he is just as confused as the reader, if not more so due to him not being entirely normal/sane at the beginning.

In the hole the Brother was deposited into, the Narrator comes across a body. Personally, it was hard for me to tell if it was the Brother’s or not as all that was shown was some hair and an eye (and the outline of his jacket I suppose). It is possible that it could be the Brother: the Narrator had just finished asking why the Brother who had come back does not look at him, implying his Brother usually does. The eye shown looking at the Narrator in the final scene could be a reference to that. It could possibly be any sort of dead body. What the Narrator finds may not even be real; he could be imagining whoever/whatever he found down in that hole, as his mind is clearly not in the best shape.