Customer Reviews
Man, I would KILL to be that beautiful......
Actually, this is only a 3 ½ star book, but Ito gets the benefit of the doubt. The stories themselves are wonderfully gruesome and creepy, but its painfully obvious that this is an earlier effort of Ito's, lacking the polish that the Uzumaki series had.
The drawings are plainer, and the dialogue is pretty stilted with occasional yawning gaps in it, but the stories are well worth the effort of journeying through.
In the first story, "Long Hair In The Attic", we learn a lesson of asking people to appear in a different way, and succumbing to another's desires of what they think we should be.
"Approval" is a tasty piece of undying love, and a valuable lesson in when to let go of that love.
"Beehive" is my least favorite, a strange story of a strange boy who has a symbiotic relationship to bees and wasps.
"Dying Young", one of my favorites, tells a tale of ugly girls who suddenly grow pretty, and the cost of such a miracle to their lives.
"Headless Sculptures", another favorite, shows what happens when a man's artwork becomes more than realistic.
And lastly, "Flesh Colored Horror", is truly the most horrifying story of all, because it shows the horrid lengths a woman will go through to maintain her beauty, even at the cost of abusing her very own child.
A great collection, just be aware that when this book was done, Ito was merely warming up to his full talents. Enjoy!
A must for a horror fan....
...even if you are not strictly a manga fan. This is some of the creepiest stuff I've seen anywhere, and with a collection of nearly 220 English-translated manga, that's saying a lot.
Gah!
Let me say that I am always and I mean always nervous every time I read a manga by Junji Ito. Why? Because they are some of the most screwed up pieces of writing that you possibly can read. the other reviewers have already written in detail about what th stories are about so I won't waste mine or your time going into detail about them, but let me say tha they are all quite disturbing. I would have the rank this book third in the works of Junji Ito that I own, the others being the two vols of Tomie and the three vols of Uzumaki, but the only reason for that is that this collection is a series of short stories that are not related to each other, but let me say the horror of these stories will stick with you and you will gasp in shock when you read them!
