Writing a story in which weird things happen is not in itself particularly hard the trick is in providing enough substance behind the strangeness to keep the reader engaged. The hallucinatory nature of the scene is heightened by the fact that it is never mentioned again until halfway through chapter three.

One of the most memorable moments in the comic comes at the end of the first chapter, when Vee looks down at her sleeping girlfriend Jessica the latter has a gaping hole in her abdomen, looking less like a wound, more like a hole in a rock, seemingly leading straight through the girl’s body and into the bed below. When the two girls catch sight of a bizarre creature, half-deer and half-human, El offers some matter-of-fact speculations: “Maybe someone fucked up a spell, or maybe it came out of the crevice in the park.” Skinless men periodically appear near a stretch of woodland, but the locals have learnt to take this in their stride: indeed, a flashback reveals that the two protagonists first met when El casually saved Vee from one of these flayed figures.

The small Pennsylvania town of Shudder-to-Think turns out to have a lot more strangeness to it than a few lost memories, as this story by writer Carmen Maria Machado and artist Dani soon makes clear. In practice, however, the mystery of the cinema turns out to be a MacGuffin that tugs El and Vee along as they, in turn, pull us through their surroundings. This, at least, is the easily-summarised hook to The Low, Low Woods the sort of thing that makes a good, catchy back-of-the-book synopsis. The Low, Low Woods Tamra Bonvillain (Colourist), Sam Wolfe Connelly (Cover artist), Dani (Artist), Carmen Maria Machado (Writer), Steve Wands (Letterer) Clearly, something has happened – something stranger than two girls falling asleep in a cinema – and so El and Vee must find out what happened during the missing slice of time. They soon find that Vee has unexplained mud on her shoes, no-one else went to see the film, and the sole staff member present is behaving oddly. Sitting in a cinema together, teenage friends El and Vee realise that neither of them has any memory of the film that has just ended.

The low low woods carmen maria machado