Shiver: Junji Ito Selected Stories

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Ito’s art is first rate and nowhere else is the body horror aspect to his stories more effective than the ones in this collection. The beautiful and mysterious Tomie Kawakami combines the horror of a demon with the powers of a succubus: She drives people into jealous rages that lead to brutal acts of violence whilst making people madly in love with her. Ito’s ideas often come from ordinary fears, both physical and existential: the unknown depths of the ocean, claustrophobia, the fear of being watched. But these holes are human-shaped, carved by people unknown and hidden in the earth for what surely must be thousands of years. Greased/Glyceride is about a family living above a barbecue restaurant their father owns that saturates the air with grease due to a lack of ventilation.

The only standout element is the central image of afflicted people covered with innumerable holes, which brings to this old comics reader's mind a very similar set of images in a 1999 Shintarō Kago story, "Punctures", as translated in VIZ's 2000 anthology Secret Comics Japan - but Kago takes the idea in his own hyper-literal grossout joke direction, as an artist can when he's shoveling pages into a porn magazine.

Little did he know, his blushing bride-to-be has some unexpected company in tow—Yon, a ghastly-looking family cat, and Mu, an adorable Norwegian forest cat. Rina was born not breathing and the doctors could not explain how she was alive; but then the holes began to open in her skin and she was somehow able to breathe through them. In “Shiver,” the story that gave the collection its name, a boy is fascinated by the reclusive girl who lives next door and has porous holes all over her body. Junji Ito made his professional manga debut in 1987 and since then has gone on to be recognized as one of the greatest contemporary artists working in the horror genre.

The Face Burglar is a doppleganger-focused tale, with a student being able to assume people's faces unconsciously. As it turns out, there's someone in the fog taking advantage of the situation and causing mass suicides in the process. Used Record or Second-Hand Record (from House of the Marionettes, あやつりの屋敷 Ayatsuri no Yashiki), a story about people fighting over the ownership of a record that has a singer's singing as they died recorded on it. Their gaunt and fearful but unchanging expressions, coupled with the mystery of what they are and where they came from, makes for a petrifying premise that’s only worsened when it becomes clear that the balloons are hunting down the people they resemble, and hanging from each balloon is a noose. The internet has transformed the impulse for expressing affection into a dehumanizing and monetizable force!All the while, as we read, we wonder whether or not there is anything to be scared of – if she is, in fact, simply a scary-looking woman.

The blurb of the story at the end was more scary then the entire premises, if you see Junji Ito somewhere observing you, run away because you might be the concept of his next story.In 2021, Ito received two more Eisner Awards for his works Remina and Venus in the Blind Spot, receiving "Best U. The anthology features strong themes of dealing with mental illness, as every story involves people with horrifying mental states. It’s a perfectly crafted and unsettling tale of Ito at his most approachable, yet still wholly wicked. His horror stories, both short and long, are all written and drawn with a surreal, off-kilter, otherworldly eeriness.