Horror, the Supernatural, and the Surreal

  • SPOILERS! There may be spoilers in this post. Do not read further, if it concerns you. It is definitely my age that gives Shintaro Kago’s Dementia 21 a little more bite. A little more darkness. A little more sadness. And a little more humor. A friend once told me that Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf tells an

    Read more →

  • THERE ARE SPOILERS IN THIS POST. DON’T READ FURTHER IF IT MATTERS TO YOU. I finally binged Grotesquerie on Hulu. I had no idea of what the show was about before starting it. I was drawn in by the “gothy” color scheme and religious imaginary, deep reds and purple hues over Christian crosses hung over

    Read more →

  • Dandadan by Yukinobu Tatsu can be read as an allegory about male pubescent ascendance and anxiety. Or it can just be fun. It can be a silly immature schoolyard joke that the author has imagined into an exciting fast-paced supernatural horror comedy. According to Anime Hunch, Yukinobu Tatsu wrote Dandadan as a desperate final effort

    Read more →

  • James is the sole survivor of an otherwise innocuous sleepover game of truth or dare. He and his friends go into the ravine in the back of his house in search of a monster he swore he didn’t make up. Unfortunately, there is a monster there and it kills all of his friends. The book

    Read more →

  • Each Kazuo Umezz story has a supernatural or mystery element and ends with a twist. The more provocative stories just end! Like “Combat” in Volume 3. It left me wondering if its “cliffhanger” ending were intentional pun (not sure if “cliffhanger” has the same meaning in Japanese as it does in English) or a conclusion

    Read more →

  • Love and the Alien

    SPOILERS! DON’T LOOK FURTHER IF IT MATTERS! Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, deserves more than the brief, unintentionally flippant review I initially gave it on Goodreads. I read it a little over a year ago and its ending still haunts me in a very welcomed way. The end of Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings

    Read more →

  • This post was initially published to Goodreads on February 12, 2023. An Invitation from a Crab by panpanya Panpanya creates imaginative, often surreal stories from the little life details most others would ignore. For example, one story describes the “mysterious” toys the protagonist’s grandmother gives her – old timey gadgets foreign to the modern age

    Read more →

  • Despair Deserved Better

    Despair deserved better in Volume 11 of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman series, Endless Nights. She deserved the narrative thread that Delirium got to connect the varied and convoluted thoughts of its characters. Compared to the stories of their Endless siblings, Delirium and Despair have the most unconventional and abstract structures. I’m not going to say

    Read more →