A kindness someone else finds frightening
Emmy is almost eighteen. She lives on a farm with her father, and an old tree outside her window keeps finding its way into her nightmares. Years earlier, the townspeople hanged a witch from that tree and burned her. Before she died, she promised she would return. Now those same people are watching Emmy.
“For Emmy, something wonderful has happened. For him, it is something to worry about.”
But look at how the book introduces her. A newborn calf is struggling to survive. Her father goes to fetch his gun because he does not want it to suffer. Emmy stays beside the calf and touches it. By the time he returns, it is walking. She is delighted. She has even named him Shaky.
Then Tyler Crook shows us her father, still holding the gun. For Emmy, something wonderful has happened. For him, it is something to worry about. We are watching a girl discover what she can do while the adults around her look for reasons to fear it.
The thing in the woods feels like someone
Emmy follows a strange boy into the woods. What she finds is his empty skin, caught among the thorns. It moves. It tries to speak. Soon she is carrying it home through the same woods she has known all her life.
The encounter is grotesque, but the way Emmy talks to him makes him feel like someone. There is even humor in it: she puts him in a dresser drawer while she changes because she does not trust a boy not to peek. The horror leaves room for her ordinary assumptions, manners, and impatience.
That is part of what makes Emmy easy to care about. She can be frightened without treating every strange creature as a thing to destroy. Her response to the boy carries some of the same instinct as her response to the calf: stay close enough to understand what is happening.
The horrible thing belongs to the landscape
Crook makes this world beautiful enough that you understand why Emmy belongs here. Golden leaves, weathered fences, sunlight on the barn: the countryside has a warmth that gives the idea of home substance. It is somewhere worth being attached to.
When Emmy carries the boy’s skin through the woods, the colors do not suddenly turn cold to announce a different kind of place. The horrible thing belongs to the landscape as much as the trees do. The watercolor lets beauty and decay remain close together, rather than assigning each its own separate scene.
Crook’s faces keep that landscape personal. Emmy’s delight over the calf and her father’s hesitation are both readable. Cullen Bunn gives us a mystery about what she is; Crook keeps us close to the young woman who has to live with the answer.
The people who already know your name
Later that night, the boy helps Emmy overhear the people gathered outside. These are people who know her, people she has grown up around. Suddenly, the thing without a body feels less threatening than the familiar faces in the dark.
That is the part I find most frightening. Emmy has not stopped being the girl who wanted to save a calf. Something about her is making the people around her see someone else. Their shared history does not guarantee that they will give her a chance to explain herself.
Start with Countless Haints, the first four issues of Harrow County. It opens a larger story, so choose it when you want a world and a central character to keep following. You want Emmy to understand what is happening. You also want someone to give her the chance to decide who she will become.
