Review: In Megan Kearney's CORPSE DE BALLET, the art form is the ghost

Content note: This review discusses eating disorders, body shaming, student deaths, and an abusive friendship, all central to the book.

Megan Kearney's solo graphic novel debut, Corpse de Ballet, is a dark academia ballet thriller that keeps circling one question: What and who is ballet (and other traditional art forms) for — and is training in those forms meant to make great artists, or reproduce the past? Kearney never answers it cleanly, and the book is better for it. 

Corpse de Ballet also marks a hard left turn for Kearney. Her last ballet book, Swan Lake: Quest for the Kingdoms, co-created with writer Rey Terciero, was a fairy-tale adventure (also based on ballet) that earned a Kirkus starred review and is in development at Paramount Animation. Same art form, opposite mood—this time the swans are dead, and the school won't stop dancing.

The graphic novel follows Rosie Hammond, a scholarship student with "promise" and "spark," who is a late admit at a (fictional) prestigious classical dance academy, called St. Anselmus. As a late addition to the student body, there are rumors among other dance students that Rosie's a "waitlist" admission, which is meant to communicate that she obviously has less talent, so, from day one, she's already carrying the weight of proving she belongs. 

On top of that, she has some big dance shoes to fill. Just before Rosie enrolled, the former roommate (and BFF) of her new roommate, Eugenie, disappeared. And Eugenie is sure it's something paranormal and macabre, and the two girls sink into an obsession with figuring out what really happened to the student who vanished suddenly, and without notice — at least without notice to Eugenie, who is sure her former BFF would have told her if she was leaving the school.

Ballet, and its historical works, work perfectly as frames for the themes of Corpse de Ballet, and luckily, for the uninitiated, Kearney does a good job establishing the basics of these traditional works and why they matter to the story. For the annual showcase, the school is doing the ballet, Coppélia, about a toymaker who makes a doll (his vision of perfect beauty) who captivates a young local man's attention enough that he's ready to leave his fiancée, until she poses as the doll to win him back. Thus, Kearney's gothic wink is in the source material. Coppélia descends from E.T.A. Hoffmann's The Sandman, also a German gothic tale of a man undone by a lifelike doll. Kearney has said the book is full of nods to early 19th-century German gothic fiction, and that it's fine if they sail over readers' heads.

Additionally, the book itself is framed by the story of Giselle, a ballet with German gothic roots, whose heroine's weak heart stops over her faithless lover. Having died of a broken heart, she's initiated into the "Willies," a group of venegenful ghosts who lure men to dance to their deaths. However, Giselle is more than a textual nod that establishes the creator's ballet pedigree; like Coppélia, it's a nod to one of the graphic novel's larger questions: What parts and how much of oneself should be sacrificed for one's art? For Rosie, as it has been for many before her, she must confront whether she will let her dedication to her art form—and perfecting it—consume her, or if she can move beyond the ghosts of ballet's past haunting her…

What lingers is how fully the structure of Kearney's Corpse de Ballet becomes the theme. Dance here is a haunted art, so stuck on unreachable beauty that it keeps re-performing its own dead. Rosie's roommate Eugenie turns from friend to frenemy to threat—the jealous lover of Coppélia made flesh—as her twisted relationship with her past is slowly revealed. Their abusive, toxic friendship mirrors what an all-consuming relationship with an art form does: it turns Rosie into a ghost of herself, miles away from the values that once tethered her to others.

The book is at its sharpest with reflections on how dance treats the body, at least in my own experience — even if some of it can read a bit sensationalist. Rosie is invited into a secret society run by the headmistress, and the women there pick her apart on arrival. One says she prefers art to be all-consuming, not the artist. Later, her roommate tells her that her chest makes her better suited to the male roles, then keeps up the jabs about how she eats. Those voices are drawn as faceless silhouettes—anyone, anywhere in the dance world. It's a canny choice.

The novel's body count mirrors a grim reality: deaths from eating disorders in dance remain all too common, despite schools' efforts to ease the pressure to be thin. Olivia James, a fictional star with the crossover fame of a Misty Copeland, also lost a fellow student during her time at the academy. Kearney draws the pressure as the demand to look like a corpse of yourself. The title reads as gallows humor, and the book earns it.

History gets a quiet seat at the table in other ways. The art nods to Edgar Degas's famous work "Little Dancer," long admired as an object of beauty, while her real life was about survival. In that era, dancers depended on male patrons for money and access, a system that was exploitative but also “pushed the form to new artistic heights,” according to the school’s headmistress, who distills her ethos down to: in ballet, preservation comes first, with the art's history recorded on dancers' bodies.

As I briefly touched on above, my reservation is sensationalism. Billed for Black Swan fans, it leans toward horror-movie ballet over accurate ballet. Take the opening scene, where Rosie finds tacks in her new shoes. It nods to real incidents, but it isn't common—certainly not in today’s schools, though I've heard similar stories out of Russian ones. Rosie's descent into madness is stomach-turning, especially for anyone who has lived inside elite ballet culture.

That specificity is no accident. Kearney, an animator by training, has said she hunted for each gesture's extreme poses, the key frames that make a dance sequence stand out to the viewer, so that a reader who knows ballet would see someone who'd been watching closely. Drawing dance was her favorite part. The research shows: the project grew from a stack of ballet magazines she found at a flea market, and from her own time at a fiercely competitive arts college. Her influences include Perfect Blue, Revolutionary Girl Utena, and the original Suspiria, and you can feel all three in the book's warped perception and surreal dread.

Corpse de Ballet won't be for everyone, but it's a gorgeous, haunting graphic novel about what ballet does to the people inside it. Recommended for young readers and for anyone willing to get deep in the ballet weeds.

Corpse de Ballet: A Graphic Novel by Megan Kearney, from First Second, hit shelves on July 7, 2026. The hardcover is priced at $25.99, and the paperback at $19.99. Order your copy here.