The only nit-picky exception is character faces, which look particularly samey in this book. Where I don’t think Ito has lost his touch is the art. It felt too much like Ito was grasping at weirdness. It makes for some really bizarre behaviour unfolding on the page, and the fate of the lead character makes for an unsettling reveal image on its own, but this premise was simply baffling.

She also constantly exhibits unusual tics herself, which the people around her constantly mimic. This is so much the case that she’s imprisoning people until they develop strange tics from confinement to inspire her for her next book.

With the worst cases I found myself scratching my head with confusion, the worst outcome of strangeness in horror.įor example, the story “Magami Nanakuse” involves a novelist who is known for giving her characters unusual tics, which for some reason is the source of her success as a writer. With these better stories there was just something in the delivery or an added small detail here or there that made things a little confusing, and not in such a way as when vagueness breeds good horror by leaving it to your imagination. There were a few specific stories that didn’t do much for me at all, but even in the case of those that were better written there was still a sense of lacking. Unfortunately, this collection was all over the place in terms of quality, oftentimes dipping well below what I expect from the author.

Nevertheless, I’ve really enjoyed Ito’s work that I’ve read thus far, so I was cautiously optimistic going into this book that the stories within would still be of a certain quality that I could enjoy. Going in I had heard the author himself considered the collection a little below par for him, as he had gotten rusty after almost a decade away from the genre. Ranging from the terrifying to the comedic, from the erotic to the loathsome, these stories showcase Junji Ito’s long-awaited return to the world of horror.įragments of Horror by Junji Ito is, according to the afterword, the author’s return to drawing and writing horror after an eight-year hiatus. A funeral where the dead are definitely not laid to rest. A dissection class with a most unusual subject. An old wooden mansion that turns on its inhabitants. A new collection of delightfully macabre tales from a master of horror manga.

Fragments of horror ito