Book Review: Shiver: Selected Stories by Junji Ito

 

⋆⋆⋆⋆

Content Warning: death, violence, gore, body horror, trypophobia, misogyny (violent), entomophobia, suicide.

In this collection of some of Junji Ito's best works, we encounter stories of possession, sickness, jealousy, and the mundane becoming terrifying. An ancient jade carving opens up holes on its owner's body; a legendary record plays an unspeakable song; an unusual fashion model is hired by a film crew who ends up biting off more than they can chew; a doctor's patient has dreams that are becoming longer and longer as time goes on; and many more tales within will leave you shivering and wondering what the next page will hold... 

I reviewed Ito's massive collection of Tomie stories on this blog a while back, and ever since then, I've become quite a big fan of his wonderfully twisted art. This decently-sized book will keep you entertained with each of its stories, and while some are more successful than others, I was once again impressed by how Ito manages to combine the horrible with the beautiful, the everyday with the unbelievably strange.

It's difficult to pick out a single favorite amongst the nine stories told in this collection, but I think if I were forced to choose, Honored Ancestors and The Long Dream were the two that fully captured my attention, leaving me pondering some rather philosophical questions. Both of these stories play with existential horror, with legacy and death, with being left behind. I also must mention how Ito incisively comments on beauty standards; all of his Tomie stories and the ones that feature Fuchi take us to opposite ends of the beauty spectrum, and again, with Tomie's character, we see once more that question of legacy and immortality.

Also, perhaps even more importantly, these stories still somehow manage to be fun, regardless of the dark, grim subject matters Ito usually handles. Although there are extremely heavy topics discussed -- suicide, bullying, loneliness, abuse, control and power, misogyny -- it never felt as if I were being beat over the head with a morbid take on the world. Today, we see a lot of media like this: relentlessly dark, the sort of perspective that implies evil is unbeatable, inevitable, and every person in the world is selfish and cruel. Not so in Ito's world: its strangeness and evil has a life of its own, and you get the feeling that Ito himself is having fun playing with horror, grotesquery, and outsiders becoming heroes. 

His accomplishment of melding visual art with literary storytelling is no small feat, and again, I must recommend that you give this fantastic collection a shot. 

For those of us who are already established Ito fans, there's also the bonus of author commentary on how he came up with his ideas and concepts for these crazy stories, and also some of his rough sketches before the images became definite! Highly recommended.