Deserter: Junji Ito Story Collection

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Other cancelled products: If you want to cancel products that are not damaged or incorrectly supplied, then you must inform us of this within seven working days following the date of receipt in accordance with the Distance Selling Regulations or otherwise as soon as possible. It is not included in promotions available to our main range products, as stated in our terms of service. A warm, unsentimental and beautifully-observed book for our times' Lucy Caldwell, author of These Days 'If I were in bother I'd want the Ballybrady bunch at my back. Born in Gifu Prefecture in 1963, he was inspired from a young age by his older sister's drawing and Kazuo Umezu's comics and thus took an interest in drawing horror comics himself.

The first story, “Bio House,” has shakier artwork than we’re used to seeing from him, but it still gets across all those gruesome vibes he’s so good at creating. The title story “Deserter” and “The Long Hair in the Attic” had unexplainable manifestations of evil that made me want just a few more answers. The images of the dream self doing this are visceral, imaginative, and downright amazing, making this a particularly creepy story. Instead, it grapples with the dilemma of having to deal with such a person and whether the retribution doled out by the other students is going too far, punctuated by a perfectly unsettling moment at the end that leaves things in suspense without feeling unresolved. there are some quite creative ideas and as expected with Ito, things lean heavily into weird and body-horror, with some nicely done panels (page 80 of Where The Sandman Lives for example).It’s a creative way of portraying a difficult subject though it doesn’t make it that interesting to read either. The book collecting 12 of his earliest stories was a nice, appreciable novelty too that helped this collection stand out to me in the same way as Shiver, which is a best-of collection hand-picked by Ito himself.

In ‘Face Thief’, the simple art combined with the premise (there are two unrelated girls who look identical) results in a lot of confusion; I didn’t know who was supposed to be who half the time.That said, the two final tales in the volume, both of which deal with forms of bullying, were a bit too on the nose with their casual cruelty. For a complete list of books Kris has read, as well as shorter less eloquent reviews, check Kris’ goodreads out. I’d like to know when, and in what context, they were first published; what, for example, is the background of ‘The Reanimator’s Sword’, which leans more towards fantasy than horror and seems like an outlier here? But then there’s ones like “The Reanimator’s Sword” which seems interesting at first, but then it devolves into an immortal chosen one style of story. Parts of stories can be mildly interesting - the eerie village in the Siren story, the strange plan the family hatch and stick with in Deserter, the idea of a dream version of you emerging into the waking world in Where the Sandman Lives - but other parts are underwritten or, as is usually the case, not explained at all, so they read as amateurish and silly.