Let me in your window
Manga artist: Adam Ellis
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication date: September 2025
Digital horror is the natural evolution of analog horror, a genre that has exploded in popularity since the early 2020s. While analog horror explores the shadows of 20th century technology memories, digital horror is played in the marginal spaces of 21st century Internet culture. Just as our ancestors saw monsters deep in the moonlight forest, we are now telling stories about the mysterious and terrifying things we saw online. The internet is different from the infamous Navidson home in Leaf House. It may seem healthy on the surface, but the deeper you go, the bigger and more stranger.
Adam Ellis’ second horror comic collection, Let Me in Your Window, is its best digital horror. As the successor to Bad Dreams in the Night Ellis’ 2024 collection, bring the wire into the venture even deeper in your window as we speak of the unsettling surrounding the ubiquitous ghosts that tell us through our screens. Even if most of us are happy to allow these phantoms to be unaware, it can be unsettling to understand that we are seeing ghosts, that ghosts are catalogued, and that we are always seeing ghosts that leave traces of their former days. Ten stories collected in Let Me In Your Window invite readers to reflect on the meaning of inhabiting the ever-revolving urban legends of online culture.
In “Hello Charlie”, hotel guests notice that someone is adding songs to their Spotify playlists via their local Wi-Fi network. He has a playful conversation with a stranger in the form of the song’s title, but what begins as a harmless flirtation quickly becomes creepy and perhaps dangerous. The idea of having a stalker is offensive to begin with, but digital stalkers are even worse. No matter how many miles you travel through the real world, digital stalkers are always online and waiting to log in.
In one of the longer stories in the collection, “The Old Machine,” the man is contacted by the ghost of a sister who died in the AOL Instant Messenger. She assures him that this is not a prank or glitch. Rather, she is trapped in a kind of purgatory, and old technology is the only way she can communicate. She warns her brother that some of the people trapped in her are thinking of ways to use new technology to return to the world of life.
Perhaps the person writing these messages is certainly a human mind, but there are other possibilities. What happens to these traces of ourselves when technology becomes obsolete after we pour much of our soul into the machine? And what happens when technology advances enough that these ghosts of ourselves will return?
“Old Machines” are not explicitly explicit about AI or LLMS. This creepy absence of a clear referent is in its credits. The story accurately draws that fear from a sense of uncertainty. We can’t truly know what voices are speaking from the other side of the screen, and we still don’t understand how unknown voices will become louder and more common in the rapidly approaching future.
The Gospels entertain horrifying speculation about the uncertainty that bends implicit reality into post-pandemic online spaces. The government declines to comment when an unidentified projectile hits the moon. Two people in a small town in a Maine coastal town are unfolding on screen like a wild whirlwind of competing rumors swirl online. While urban social disruptions do not affect life more than the country’s depopulation already has, the two still suffer from a sense of urgent fear. The rant extremists begin to take over the broadcast, and they seem indifferent – but what if they are actually right this time? This story is a fantastic work of adoring universe horror, but it is difficult to read without the same tingly tinged timbre of fear as the main character, in the wake of a decade of intense online conspiracy theory.
“Sunken Express” approaches a similar theme from different directions. In this story, an aging millennial meets his young self on a time-traveling subway train that is rumoured to run through an abandoned tunnel under New York. Adults want to go back to the time before the internet, but his child desperately wants to move forward into an era where he can become openly gay as a result. Remember that Ellis is kind to the ghosts of the past, which may induce anxiety as in the present.
Despite the eerieness of his story (and the occasional galiness), Ellis’ character is drawn fascinatingly and persuasively animated. The mature but cartoon-inspired art style adds a touch of visual nostalgia to the story that resonates strongly with adult readers who grew up with the Internet. The eerie background art of Elena Kononenko in the opening story is a contributor to a timeless, otherworldly shade that sets a decent oppressive tone and firmly sets the collection in the present cultural moment.
From underground urban legends to cursed YouTube channels, embark on your window into thinking-inspired explorations in the ghostly spaces of digital culture. Based on the analog horror boom of the early 2020s, Adam Ellis brings speculation to the ghosts he encounters through the windows of the screen, and his fascinating character gives emotional depth to the fragmentation of identity and the unrest surrounding the social media panopticon. Taking me back in your window is a timely reflection on culture mediated through digital windows, but it is also a fantastically unsettling collection of stories that are as creepy as you find online.
Available in your window from Simon & Schuster.
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