HORROR MONTH #29: Out of Skin, by Emily Carroll (2013)

Type of Media: Webcomic

If you aren't the kind of person who takes the burdens of others onto yourself, you definitely know someone like that. The person who sees the consequences of someone else's actions but still feels responsible themselves. Maybe it's guilt by association, or a feeling that they could have done more to stop that bad thing from happening. They become a home for the sins of others.

Out of Skin is a short webcomic by writer and illustrator Emily Carroll. Taking place in some old European woodland (think the kind of forest from a Grimms' fairy tale), a woman who lives alone finds a pit full of women's corpses. The only contact she has is with a man who trades goods in a nearby town. She buries the bodies, and the next day she finds a tree made of skin with hands for leaves growing from the pit. That night the dead women come to the woman's cottage and demand she let them in, but the woman ignores them. Eventually they leave, but... I'll just say they find a way to stay with her. The story is only six pages long, I can't give too much away.

The lone woman realizes quickly who the murderer is. However, she's the one the dead women haunt. She suffers at their hands, but when the trader comes to visit he doesn't realize anything is wrong. She essentially becomes another one of his victims, and it's only when the woman says something that the greying women turn their wrath on the trader. If she had let her loneliness get the best of her, the woman may well have said nothing, acting as the traitor's accessory and taking his cosmic punishment. However, that's just one reading of it. Out of Skin is brief and has no obvious message, leaving itself open to interpretation.

Carroll's art feels lovingly illustrated, like the kind you'd find in your favorite children's book, even when it's showing gruesome images. The color palette is pale, with lots of greys, muted browns and yellows, broken up by bright splashes of blood red. What's especially impressive is Carroll's use of visuals to show a concept and omit dialogue, as if the woman narrating is having a thought so horrific she can't put words to it.

Out of Skin feels very much like a fairy tale in the raw, the bloody and vaguely nihilistic kinds parents used to tell their kids before Disney got their hands on Grimms' and sanitized everything. There's no excuse not to give it a read, as it only takes ten minutes max. If you enjoy it, check out Emily Carroll's book of horror comics Through the Woods, as well as her other work she's put online.