Through the Woods

Through the Woods is a kids' book in the same way that Grimm's original fairy tales are: murderously bloody and almost gleefully unsettling. Carroll (another Canadian!) makes her book-length debut with five beautifully creepy graphic tales of intimate, otherworldly terror, of ghostly embraces, isolated farmhouses, and burrowing demons. The stories are short, but you'll keep coming back to them in the same way you keep looking under your bed to make sure the monster still isn't there. (12 and up)