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There's not much that is typical about Junji Ito's manga work, but he certainly had his own style and methods for delving into the dark, the bizarre and the horrific, with no small amount of body horror. That's sounds like it might be somewhat formulaic, but within that genre he often manages to be very creative and surprising. Some of his works are episodic in nature, each chapter revealing a different type of horror that individually culminate in an explosive manner building up to an even more shocking conclusion, and that is very much the style of Black Paradox . Within that however, anything can happen... Four young people - Taburo, Pii-Tan, Baracchi and Maruso - gather together under unusual circumstances, meeting on the site Black Paradox and agreeing to form a suicide club. Without much preamble, they drive out to a location where they will realise their desire to exit this world. Each has their own motives but there is a common feeling that drives them in some way,

One of the characteristics that make Junji Ito a master of horror, aside from his own imagination and creativity, is the way his stories are often connected to Japanese folk character and tradition. It's something that all the best horror writers do, tapping into mythology and dark fears rooted in traditions that have an element of the eerie or bizarre about them. That's true about at least two of the stories in this new collection, but there are other deep concerns related to recent social and health issues that seem to have influenced and added to how Ito approaches the dark turns each of these stories take. In his afterword, Ito talks about how these stories may have only made it to the light of day because of the Covid lockdown. Developed from sketches of ideas that had been around for a long time, it seemed the right time to let his imagination and talent loose on them. The fevered aspect of the stories certainly reflects some of the concerns and fears going through his an

We're more used to see Corto Maltese deal with mysticism in the context of African or Asian ceremonies and dark voodoo rituals. There's another stream of European mysticism to be found in (of all places) Switzerland in Le Elevetiche Rosa Alchemica . The manner in which Corto is drawn into this world is very much like that of a hallucinogenic trip, and it's a very trippy experience that takes up the majority of the album. Corto accompanies old friend Professor Jeremiah Steiner to Montagnola in the canton of Tessin, Switzerland. He's as interested as Steiner in a conference being held by Herman Hesse on esoterica and alchemy. Arriving at their destination, they are met by a strange ambiguous figure of indeterminate age, who looks 10 but claims to be either 4 or 730, who introduces themselves as Klingsor or Hermann Hesse. They are in a strange place all right, but it's about to get even stranger. Soon Corto is conversing with images of medieval sages on the wall about

Olivier Norek's Victor Coste/Banlieues Trilogy goes to some grim places where drugs and violent crime crime is rampant in Paris, but the third book in the series  Surtensions (published in English as  Breaking Point ) opens up in one of the grimmest of all: the penitentiary of Marveil. Overcrowded and with the worst criminals locked away, with fewer than one warden per 100 prisoners, the wisest thing to do is keep your head down and stay safe. That goes for the guards as much as the prisoners, but that's easier said than done, as detainee 4657, 22 year old of Corsican origin, Nunzio Mosconi, known as Nano, finds out when sharing a cell with a brute like Machine. The first part of Surtensions feels like it covers ground we've been over many times before. " Il n'existe pas d'endroit plus dangereux, inégal et injuste que la prison... La prison comme une école du crime. " It deals with the daily beatings, rapes and mistreatment of Nano, and it's not pre

In Vudù per il Presidente , Corto Maltese gets mixed up in a very dangerous business - what else? - while in Barbados with Professor Steiner, but here the threats come not just from the living but the undead. In Port Ducal, Steiner tells him he has heard stories about the walking dead and that the president is rumoured to be a demon. Corto dismisses this as fantasy, even though he knows from his own personal background that stranger things have happened. It is revealed here that Corto's mother was a gypsy from Gibraltar and a witch, while his father from Cornwall is a nephew of an old devil from Tintagel.  Corto's immediate problems however are more earth bound, rescuing Steiner from a prison cell in Port Ducal. Once base for pirates before the indigenous tribes wiped out the foreigners and proclaimed it an independent republic, the island still remains a dangerous place for foreigners. Corto attends a trial taking place of Soledad Lokaarth, who accused of occult activities, ra

There have been few writers of the supernatural who have made such a lasting impression on how we view the world - or the world outside the reality we know it - as Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Other than Mike Mignola, it's hard to think of any writer/artist who would be adventurous enough and of sufficient ability to put that vision into images and truly do justice to it. Daria Schmitt however boldly places Lovecraft at the centre of this beautifully crafted 120-page graphic novel and finds a way of putting her own stamp on that vision. It might not be based on any real or biographical detail that we know about the writer from Providence, Rhode Island, but it finds a way to delve into the extraordinary mind of the writer who seems to have inhabited a far less tangible reality. The Monstrous Dreams of Mr. Providence is perhaps not quite as dark a journey into the esoteric, the hidden and the occult as Lovecraft's creations, but it's just as ambitious and imaginative in its at

You probably shouldn't look for a single overarching theme much less a through-narrative in a diverse collection of short stories, but in the case of The Apparitions , Anne Devlin's first collection in over 35 years, such is the coherency of the themes that each reader could find something unique and personal within it. The title story of the collection Winter Story (The Apparitions)  indeed clearly sets the tone for what is to follow, in a meeting between a man and a woman who only know each other from a passing familiarity when they both went to or worked in the same bar many years ago. The story, and what follows, becomes a gathering together of impressions and memories, of travels and personal journeys, the people and the things that have stuck with us over the years that float back in the memory like apparitions, demanding that we take notice of them. The best short stories work this way, not relying on narrative as the sole means of telling a story but seeking to find an

With his usual clarity, precision and way of drawing you immediately into a story, it doesn't take too long for M.R. Mackenzie to put names to the three women carrying a body to a shallow grave in the woods in the prologue of Bury Your Secrets . There are a few other elements that encourage you to read further, not least of which obviously is to find out who is dead and what went so badly wrong that the three ordinary young women on a break to a remote Scottish town need to bring a body to the woods in the dark of night. If it turned out to be Hazel's errant and arrogant husband Matthew you wouldn't be surprised but it seems unlikely. Yes, he might have been caught on cheating on Hazel with a blonde secretary in their own bedroom, but he hasn't been invited on the girls' trip evidently and she doesn't seem ready to resort to murder. Rather, Hazel has teamed up with her straight-talking hard-drinking cousin Mickie, resettled in Edinburgh from Australia, and Clair