The Low Low Woods

Shudder-To-Think, Pennsylvania, has been on fire for years. The coal mines beneath it are long since abandoned. The woods are full of rabbits with human eyes, a deer woman who stalks hungry girls, and swaths of skinless men. And the people in Shudder-to-Think? Well, they’re not doing so well either. When El and Octavia wake up in a movie theater with no memory of the last few hours of their lives, the two teenage dirtbags begin a surreal and terrifying journey to discover the truth about the strange town that they call home. Like so many women in Shudder-to-Think before them, all they have is a void where the truth once was. But as time passes, El finds herself needing to know more about what has happened, while Octavia wants nothing more than to forget the forgetting. Can these two teens reconcile their differences before the horrible things lurking beneath their town emerge and swallow them whole? Collects The Low, Low Woods #1-6.

Shudder-To-Think, PA, has been on fire for years. The coal mines beneath it are long since abandoned. The woods are full of rabbits with human eyes, a deer woman who stalks hungry girls, and swaths of skinless men. And the people in Shudder-to-Think? Well, they’re not doing so well either. When El and Octavia wake up in a movie theater with no memory of the last few hours of their lives, the two teenage dirtbags begin a surreal and terrifying journey to discover the truth about the strange town that they call home. DC and Hill House Comics present the comics debut of award-winning, bestselling horror writer Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties, In the Dream House). THE LOW, LOW WOODS explores body horror down paths yet unexplored in comics. It will leave readers searching for their way back home and terrified of what they find changed upon their return.

Octavia and El’s search for their missing memories comes to a head when the terrible secrets of Shudder-to-Think, Pennsylvania’s past are revealed at last.

In the gaslit splendor of late 19th-century New York, rage builds inside 14-year-old Daphne. The sudden death of her father has left her alone with her grief-stricken mother who becomes easy prey for a group of occultists promising to contact her dead husband. While fighting to disentangle her mother from these charlatans, Daphne begins to sense a strange, insidious presence in her own body...an entity with unspeakable appetites. What does “Brother” want? And could Daphne stop him even if she tried? Writer Laura Marks (TV’s Ray Donovan, The Expanse, and The Good Fight) and horror comics legend Kelley Jones (The Sandman, Batman: Red Rain) join forces to unleash spirits from beyond into DC’s Hill House Comics, curated by Joe Hill!

Joe Hill, "the best horror writer of our generation” (Michael Koryta), returns with a brand new short story. A balmy summer night in 1994. Four teenagers out for an evening of fun on the boardwalk take a ride on the “Wild Wheel” – an antique carousel with a shadowy past – and learn too late that decisions made in an instant can have deadly consequences. What begins as a night of innocent end-of-summer revelry, young love, and (a few too many) beers among friends soon descends into chaos, as the ancient carousel’s parade of beasts comes chillingly to life to deliver the ultimate judgment for their misdeeds.

The Box Social & Other Stories gathers together nine of James Reaney's short fictions written in the 40s and early 50s and never previously collected in book form. The collection takes its title from a short piece the author originally published in the University College Undergrad and which provoked a firestorm of eight hundred angry letters from subscribers when it was republished nationally in the New Liberty in the late 40s. It also thwarted the young author's designs on the editorship of the Undergrad because of his clear moral unsuitability for such an august position. (This is doubtful, because the Undergrad eventually came to be edited, thirty years later, by PQL publisher Tim Inkster.) `The Box Social' is remarkable, not only that it introduced the theme of date rape to Canadian literature some thirty years before the phrase was coined, but also that it is told from Sylvia's point of view, and yet again that it ends with one of the quietest lines of literary vitriol imaginable ... ` ``I hated you so much, '' she said softly.' If Alice Munro has put the sexually awakening female under glass in Lives of Girls and Women, then The Box Social could just as easily have been titled Lives of Boys and Men. In `The Bully', the brutality of what passes for etiquette in secondary school is contrasted with the simpler life of the farm personified in Noreen who drops grain in the shape of letters to feed her chickens -- `so that when the hens ate the grain they were forced to spell out Noreen's initials or to form a cross and circle. There were just enough hens to make this rather an interesting game. Sometimes, I know, Noreen spelled out whole sentences in this way, a letter or two each night, and I often wondered to whom she was writing up in the sky.' `The Bully' was included in The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories edited by Margaret Atwood and Robert Weaver. The young Margaret Atwood first encountered `The Bully' as an undergraduate. She read the story, oddly enough, in an anthology edited by Robert Weaver, and the experience was apparently seminal to her own development as a writer of fiction ...

On Alice’s sixth birthday, her dying great-aunt sent her the birthday gift she never knew she always wanted: a big, beautiful 19th-century dollhouse, complete with a family of antique dolls. In no time at all, the dollhouse isn’t just Alice’s favorite toy...it’s her whole world. And soon, young Alice learns she can enter the house to visit a new group of friends, straight out of a heartwarming children’s novel: the Dollhouse family. But while the Dollhouse family welcomes her with open arms, in the real world, her family life is becoming much more complicated...and deep within the Dollhouse’s twisting halls, the Black Room waits, with an offer to Alice. The house can fix all this, the Black Room says. All she has to do is say the words... From there unfolds a twisty, surreal, multigenerational horror tale that echoes into centuries past, into Alice’s tormented future, and into the beating heart of the madness that makes up our world...literally. Collects The Dollhouse Family #1-6.

El and Octavia’s memories have gone missing. Like so many women in Shudder-To-Think, PA, before them, all they have is a void where the truth once was. But as time passes, El finds herself needing to know more about what has happened, while Octavia wants nothing more than to forget the forgetting. Can these two teenage dirtbags reconcile their differences before the horrible things lurking beneath their town emerge and swallow them whole?