Rating: 3.5/5
Favorite story: "Earthbound"
Least favorite: "Ghosts of Prime Time"
Here's another short one for you guys, do you all also find it hard to write lengthy reviews for things like manga? I do, so if you find all my Junji Ito reviews relatively short, that's why. Anyway, I digress.
This book is one of Ito's short story collections wherein most of the stories are unrelated. There are a few who are about the same characters, though the first of the three is told from an opposite perspective (it was actually a clever way to handle things). There are thirteen stories and its fair to say that some of them are far better than the others. I wasn't actually that impressed with the stories in this one. I've read Fragments of Horror, so I'm at least a little familiar with his short story work and I much preferred Fragments to this one. The stories in the beginning are considerably less appealing than those at the end. As a whole work, its decent, certainly worth the read. The art is as amazing as always, and his ability to make the mundane and innocuous creepy is impressive. I don't think they were all successes, but most of them were at least pretty good. There are some good storytelling elements within the stories (even though most of them are pretty short), complete with a bit of mystery here and there. I think that Ito likes to take risks with the stories that he tells, in that he likes to make the normal into something creepy. Sometimes it pays out and sometimes it doesn't. "Ghosts of Prime Time" is an example of a big fail in terms of creepiness factor and also the ability to grab the reader's interest. It's just kind of lame, I say if you read this book that this one is 100% worth skipping. It just isn't good. But on the whole, I think that though this hasn't been my favorite of Ito's works, it's still decent. If you've been thinking about reading it, there's still merit there.