Uzumaki

Eleventh Book of the spooky season (Well Manga, but it definitely counts!)
Trying to read horror or at least books with horror elements for the whole month of October.

WOW!

Absolutely dreadful, unexpected, horrible and twisted piece of work. Watching this town devolve and fall prey to the spiral was agonizing, and turning each page was some weird new horror.

The medium felt amazing, the stark contrast of black and white and the beautiful imagery of full panel manga shots.

I don’t think I’ll look at a spiral the same way again.

Uzumaki is an exercise in cosmic horror that owes a great deal to the Lovecraftian tradition. A small seaside town not unlike Innsmouth but Japanese is cursed with being overwhelmed by a spiralling (literally) and incomprehensible horror, following its own demented logic every few centuries.

But this is a very Japanese story which plays on Japanese small town normalities and relationships to build the horror in stages from relatively lightweight episodes into something much larger, weirder and disturbing. The East Asian interest in body horror comes to play a major role.

Pregnant women become bloodsucking vampires and sew their children back into the womb. Humans turn into giant meaty snails which are cannibalised by desperate townsfolk show more unable to leave a town where every route leads back into itself as food supplies dwindle.

A pond, from which comes the clay of pots with spiral decorations, becomes central to the story. Hair spirals out of control. Humans obsessively curl up into spirals and become distorted. Spiralling is obsession and OCD. It is in the mind and in the material world, omnipresent.

The genius of the book lies in the way it builds up each segment of horror into the next so that we see, for example, the buildings shown us at the beginning merge into spirals in which humans seeking to escape natural disaster becoming enmeshed in more body horror, There are no good choices.

This is the theme of the book - there are no good choices. There are few choices at all. The spiralling is a form of destiny or fate that draws the characters we come to care about ever closer to a cosmic doom that is not 'explained' but simply 'is' - much like Lovecraft's own grim materialism.

Naturally, being Japanese, the culture of Hiroshima, tsunamis and Godzilla, the book accelerates into geographical devastation. Spiralling winds play a major role that increases in force as the story progresses. It is these demonic winds that do much to destroy agency and choice.

Or rather the wind is the only force that seems to permit a choice as our protagonists - a young woman and her frightened and depressed boyfriend - face individuals who can choose to provoke the winds into destructive energy. There are thus some choices but only those willed to the bad.

The horror lies as much in the total loss of agency for the good and the normal in the face of cosmic madness and low level human stupidity, greed, selfishness and malice as it does in the cosmic terror created by something operating its own rules as a force of nature with no interest in humanity.

The graphic work is clean and within the Japanese manga tradition but these graphics are less interesting than the story. This is a good thing. Ito is often picturing horrors that are best thought rather than seen although he does not shy away from the visceral when the tale demands it.

Since the first two or three stories are standard fare in horror comic lore, you should ain to persist because these initial tales of the Weird Tales type contain many of the components that you will need to comprehend the scale of later horrors. The work is a whole and not a collection of parts. show less

This tale of interlinking stories within a town haunted by spirals is perhaps Ito's finest work and certainly from the selection i have read so far. There is so much grotesqueness on show here from human snails, horrific preganancies, human jack in the boxes, hideous body morphism, cursed lighthouses and sentient-seeming storms - all of it lushly illustrated in Ito's evocative style.

What stands this one out though is how everything links together so seemlessly despite being multi-volume, with stories returning later as the meta tale literally spirals out of control to the cataclysmic finale.

If you want a showcase of what makes Ito so good at atmsopheric and graphic horror, this is a perfect place to start. but be warned, it's quite show more shocking in places. show less

This is genuinely horrifying.

I have not read much Manga and chose this due to its high rating and amazing art. I have been impressed that the author was able to turn the abstract idea of "spirals" into a horror. I am not usually a horror reader and so found that I had to dip in and out of the book, reading just a single chapter in a sitting before letting it rest (and my mind recover :P).

I think I would have given this a 5star rating if manga and/or horror were more in my wheelhouse.

This was an amazingly well done (and disturbing) manga. The story was incredibly well done, you can tell there is a heavy HP Lovecraft influence here. All of the Uzumaki story is included in this one large volume, which was awesome.

I enjoyed this a ton and had trouble putting it down. The story is strangely engaging. I kept wanting to read chapters to see what bizarre new horror would overtake the town of Kurozu-cho. I was absolutely dying to know how it would all play out.

The illustration is beautifully detailed and so interesting to look at. Ito-san much have taken a ton of time drawing this manga; it was amazing.

The characters also have a lot of depth to them. You really feel for Shuichi; whose parents were taken by the spiral’s show more madness early on. He is smart and savvy, but also ends up struggling to stay engaged in day to day life after his ordeals. Kirie is an interesting character as well; she is almost strangely innocent and passive to the horrors that go on around her. Despite her innocence she has a keen sense of survival as well.

Overall I would highly recommend to those who enjoy horror manga. This was an incredibly well done manga that obviously had a lot of time and thought put into both the story and the illustration. It is incredibly gory and disturbing so I would recommend to adult readers only (older teen would probably be okay too if they are really into horror). Highly recommended. show less

Masterpiece, only sold short by its abrupt ending.
There's so much to talk about in this particular omnibus (only the second horror manga I've ever read) - body horror, cannibalism, and so on - that you must read it to believe it. A small coastal town in Japan is cursed (hence the name, which means spiral in Japanese), and everything goes to hell. There are short stories on everything - such as mosquitoes (whose flying pattern is similar), snails (with the shape of their backs), and even tornadoes.
There's little to no characterization here, and I didn't know beforehand that this was a loose collection of short stories with a joining narrative, but that didn't detract from my immersion. There are the usual tropes here - a slightly show more unhinged deuteragonist with a gory past, the protagonist who's somehow not affected by the mania happening, and so on. Where Uzumaki shines is in creating a sense of helplessness - at no point do you feel that the characters are in control of what's happening, and this is different from the horror we're used to (the main character saving the day). I'd recommend this only for second-hand helplessness if nothing else. show less

This cult classic horror manga is about a small town where people become obsessed with spirals. Over the 20 wildly imaginative and grotesque chapters, the obsession leads to body horror and weird phenomena.

A few of the chapters push the spiral theme to silly extremes; the characters don't always act realistically or consistently; and the conclusion, while staggering in scope, is a bit unsatisfying. But it left me thinking deeply about the conflicts and convergences between nature and human behavior, all threaded through by the inescapable, cyclic, and nihilistic curve of the spiral.

If you are a horror fan, you should read this.