The traditional formula for a gothic tale tends to go something along the lines of “woman + atmosphere = gothic”. We see it when the governess begins her strange stay at Bly Manor and when Nell hears the first creaks and groans of Hill House. That time-honored atmosphere is modernized and elevated in the first issue of Carmen Maria Machado’s new graphic series The Low, Low Woods: “Bottomless.”
I’m a fan of what I call (and maybe other people call) “Pennsylvania gothic”: the bygone coal towns spotting the foothills of the Poconos made irrelevant by time and change, the beer parties in the woods and small-town entertainment of outdated movie theaters or arcades that come with growing up in a place that the cities forgot. Machado, who hails straight from Lehigh County—a place replete with once-functioning-smokestacks-turned-town-decor and recreation options centered on the surrounding wilderness—is uniquely positioned to establish her Pennsylvania gothic as something akin to Stephen King’s particular stamp on Maine-based horror.
Set in the 1990s, our two protagonists awake in their local movie theater, disoriented and ill at ease with their decrepit hometown of Shudder-To-Think, PA, where a coal fire has destroyed the once-lucrative mining industry (PA natives and Atlas Obscura enthusiasts abroad will recognize the clear influence of Pennsylvania’s real-life, perpetually burning coal town of Centralia). People in the town seem to be in a state of waiting—for death, for a change, for the town to finally be engulfed in flames—and some even feel like sinister ghouls lurking in the shadows.
This setting, which straddles the intersection between weird fiction, magical realism, and the coming-of-age story, is both uniquely Machado and uniquely Pennsylvania (the town’s name isn’t even that out of place when we’ve got actual towns such as Echo, Asylum, Free Love Valley, and Bird-In-Hand, to name a few). It’s not just about atmosphere, though; we’re following two teenage women, El and Octavia, on the cusp of either leaving this haunted place or finding themselves trapped in it forever. That line of story has, in the past, often been relegated in Americana media to a promising young baseball star who must choose between duty to his town and family and the chance to “finally get out.” Here, Machado puts this traditional story of male burden on two queer teenage women in a world that feels like Stranger Things’ Upside Down.
In this first issue, the story itself moves at the pace of a TV pilot: world building and character introductions take up the bulk of page space, but in the skilled hands of Carmen Maria Machado, even that is a page turner, not a chore. We want to know more about this place that we’ve been dropped into and has made us just as dizzy as our leads, who are sure something sinister has happened while they slept through their movie. We want to find out what’s a dream and what’s real in this town. And, perhaps most importantly, we care about El and Octavia’s friendship and the choice they face of leaving for college and freedom, or staying trapped in Shudder-to-Think, PA. It’s not a story unfamiliar to us, even if the world it exists in is.
Machado makes the jump from prose and nonfiction memoirs into graphic novels with ease, writing both dialogue and a story that’s uniquely her own. Illustrator Dani and color artist Tamra Bonvillain give depth to the world. Their panels feel like something is always waiting around the corner, that perhaps there are hidden messages we’re missing in the foreground because we’re a bit afraid to look. It’s Lovecraft meets Clive Barker in all the best ways.
Forgive the wordplay, but the slow burn of the first issue is poised to heat up and we’re all aboard Carmen Maria Machado’s modern gothic horror ride.
The Low, Low Woods (Issue #1: Bottomless)
by Carmen Maria Machado
DC
Published on December 18, 2019
28 pages
Melanie is a copywriter and author of two novels, The Rules of Me published in 2018 through Waterton Publishing and a forthcoming novel in 2021 through Lanternfish Press. Her short fiction has been published in Ghost Parachute, Meat for Tea, and A Woman is a Cinema. Her nonfiction and criticism pieces have appeared on POPSUGAR, Prometheus Dreaming, and DIYMFA. She enjoys cooking, golfing, and exploring Philly’s restaurant scene.