When I Arrived at the Castle by Emily Carroll

Scenes move seamlessly into one another as the story shifts in front of our eyes. There’s an element of fluidity to whole proceeding. From there on out it’s very much a free-for-all to see how the story will continue and how it will end. But still her beauty is alien enough, uncanny in its radiance, that we can accept here as the inhuman one (even before her behavior signals that something very wrong is going to happen). The visitor to castle is herself a beast of sort, a cat of the catgril fashion (human body but long ears, and mouth with small sharp teeth), while the countess within is the beauty, ethereal and distant, drawn in alluring fashion which for moments stresses out white skin, perfectly symmetrical face, heaving bosom. Things are different in Emily Carroll’s “When I Arrived at the Castle.” Just a bit at first, and then very much so. You’ve read it and seen it in a thousand variations. The beauty comes from outside, is recognizable to the readers as ‘one of them,’ while the beast is locked within, something other and alien.

Emily Carroll has fashioned a rich gothic horror charged with eroticism that doesn’t just make your skin crawl, it crawls into it.

Like many before her that have never come back, she’s made it to the Countess’ castle determined to snuff out the horror, but she could never be prepared for what hides within its turrets what unfurls under its fluttering flags.

When I Arrived at the Castle by Emily Carroll