The Man Who Came Down the Attic Stairs

Emma and Thomas are an expectant couple who have just moved to a beautiful historic house in the countryside. Soon after their arrival, Emma gives birth to a daughter, Roslin. In the process of moving in, they discover the door to the attic is padlocked, and Thomas goes up to break the lock. When he comes down the stairs, Emma begins to suspect he is an altogether different man he's unusually distant, especially in caring for their inconsolable infant. Sounds, especially Roslin's interminable wails, play an integral part in the story, with thick scrawled onomatopoeia crowding out images in the shadowy, scratchy-lined artwork. Emma's palpable pain is evident in the evocative, dusky art, and her anxiety and helplessness are articulated in her therapy visits. The story is dark both visually and tonally, and readers will feel the unease that might accompany an episode of The Twilight Zone. Any parent can sympathize immensely with a struggling new mother, though this also has a macabre flavor that could appeal to fans of literary-tinged body horror.--Suzanne Temple Copyright 2010 Booklist

This taut graphic novella builds psychological horror brick by brick in an elegantly drawn haunted-house tale. Thomas and Emma, a young couple, move to a sprawling home in the countryside to start a family. But living in the middle of nowhere with a colicky, constantly wailing baby begins to fray Emma's nerves. Soon she's hearing strange sounds in the attic and noticing sinister changes in her increasingly cold husband as the demands of motherhood drag her down into madness. With suffused paranoia and dread amid domestic placidity suggestive of Shirley Jackson, the story tackles postpartum depression, maternal isolation, trauma, and the all-too-common parental anxiety that Emma expresses by asking, "What if some women were never meant to be mothers, and it takes a baby to find out?" Loup's carefully observed black-and-white art, fine-lined with gray ink washes for shading, gives the narrative a faintly antiquated feel that's just off-kilter enough to suggest a subtle wrongness to the house, the grounds, and the frantic human figures trapped within as the baby shrieks. Brief but effective, this unnerving work digs into the ordinary and extraordinary horrors of parenting. Agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, DeFiore & Company Literary Mgmt. (Sept.)