Deserter: Junji Ito Story Collection

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Surprisingly, the village is covered in hairlike volcanic glass fibers, and all of it shines a bright gold. After Oshima leaves from his latest "raid", Kikuyo confronts her siblings, wanting to know why they shut Furukawa in the house and pretend it is still wartime.

It’s not that these stories are bad, they are just missing out on some of the cosmic or grotesque horror I tend to read Ito for. Ito’s famous for purportedly spending up to ten hours a day on a page with pen and paper, making his artwork as dark as possible. There’s usually at least one or two stories in a Junji Ito collection that stays with me, for better or worse, but I don’t see any of the stories in Deserter doing that - they’re on the whole a very forgettable and unimpressive bunch. For the most part, these stories contain many elements of the horror genre: body horror, blood, guts, weird, psyche, dark magic, demons, dread, ominous, and a touch of obsession. For example: A girl's hair rebels against being cut off and runs off with her head; Girls deliberately catch a disease that makes them beautiful but then murder each other; a woman treats her skin with lotion so she can take it off and look at her muscles, but the skin dissolves and she tries to steal her sister's skin, etc.This fine collection of 12 short stories are sure to fill your well with fear and thought provoking horrors. 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?

One of the tourists is Evan, taking an enforced holiday from his family and work in Belfast after breaking down after the death of his daughter in infancy. The final and titular story, “Deserter,” is about a military deserter hiding in Japan years after World War II, because the people hiding him convince him the war is still going on. Bullied,” which is a famous story of Ito’s that I’ve been waiting to get to America, is a terrifying story of karma and psychological trauma built around childhood guilt. I wish I'd written down ratings for each piece of the collection individually as I was reading through it, but this was one of those times where I was more in the mood to just zone out with the manga rather than take notes, and it wasn't good enough to want to re-read it for more thorough reviewing purposes (sorry! Kris uses graphic novels and manga to start conversations with reluctant readers at his library, tricking them into reading almost an entire books’ worth through a multi-volume manga or comic series.

It allows the author to explore a lot of weird ideas like he always has and develop them in short but highly efficient stories. For a complete list of books Kris has read, as well as shorter less eloquent reviews, check Kris’ goodreads out.

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His longest work, the three-volume Uzumaki, is about a town's obsession with spirals: people become variously fascinated with, terrified of, and consumed by the countless occurrences of the spiral in nature. The last book that came out was one of his newer works, which I was unfortunately dissatisfied with as I have been with other newer work, but this information about Deserter gave me something to anticipate. Apart from the ghastly, convincingly-drawn deaths, the book projects an effective atmosphere of creeping fear as the town's inhabitants become less and less human, and more and more bizarre things begin to happen. All of our books are 100% brand new, unread and purchased directly from the publishers in bulk allowing us to pass the huge savings on to you!As a horror fan, I’ve read many offerings from Ito; Deserter stands out as showing some of the first iterations of ideas Ito draws on continuously in his career. Unendurable Labyrinth has an intriguing premise of a couple of hikers stumbling across an extreme band of ascetic monks who are trying to mummify themselves alive for… no real reason.