31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 17 (When I Arrived At The Castle)

You've got red on you.

This will probably be a much shorter post than usual, I'm afraid. There's a few reasons for that. One, the subject matter is a pretty short affair, all things considered. Nothing wrong with brevity, of course, but that leads me to issue two. I'm not much of a comic critic. I can talk about how pretty the art is, and I shall, but any specific visual drawing techniques at play beyond the immediate obvious elude me. Listen, my field is the written word and not the painted picture. With all that in mind, what have we got here? Well, it's an evocative and moody little piece of fiction, if nothing else. I looked at the cover and expected some sort of dark lesbian gothic horror fantasy. I got... some of that. Other things I got I didn't expect, but are good because it means I get to write about them. So, let's see what When I Arrived At The Castle has going for it.


Its use of color is on point! Black, white, red. That's what you get, and that's all you need. Really, let's do our best to point out the use of red as it's the only non-monochrome color used to illustrate the piece. As an accentuator, it works for narration first off. As you flip through and our protagonist catgirl ventures deeper into the castle at the behest of what must be a vampire girl countess, red splatters all over. The carpet, the portraits, the rain outside. All signifying the bloody nature of this place. It all has a certain surreality to it, and later on, as we see our catgirl taking a bath (Incidentally, there are nipples in this book, so heads up on that) the water is inky black. A knock comes to the door, gentle white at first before a blood red cacophany. We get even more surreal imagery with a fantastic "jumpscare" in page-turner form involving the vampire, and then on we go. Beneath her elegant facade we see the shades of red where some terrible true form lurks. Then come the doors, and we never actually see what is behind them, we only hear of the fates of those who have come before in two-page spread narration (with a red background, of course). As we go on, more and more red stains our catgirl.


Then, a confrontation. Our Countess is a lamia, inviting our catgirl to kill her... and we get true visceral. Red everywhere, a terrible thing finally bursting forth from the elegant countess, sinking its fangs in... and then no red. A moment of calm, a simple dream of sinking... and, eventually, the thing. The human features in white, the monstrous blood red, halfway out of the dark. True animalistic nature takes over with evocative narration, a dance of visceral red playing out in a white void. Both of them are monsters now, wrestling and tussling and biting. We dance and dance until we have a red cat, a thing with its prey in its mouth... and fade to black. That's When I Arrived At The Castle. It's a surreal piece of work with a lot of clever uses of color and allegory that I barely scratched the surface of... but these are hardly deep dives. It's pretty neat! Lots of spooky imagery, and not at all what I was expecting. Nice stuff. On to something else that's odd and wild in a lot of ways, then.