These are short, sharp bursts of shock and horror like a good episode of Twilight Zone, only there are no morals to be learned, only a Lovecraftian attitude of being at the mercy of a cruel universe that's out to get you when you show the least hint of vulnerability.

To just describe one is to spoil it since its entire premise is its reason for being. It's weird to review Junji Ito horror stories. Depression, despair, mental illness are recurring emotions in the stories. Bodies bleed, fluids ooze out of opening, unhealing wounds. Fear of sexuality is also prevalent when men and women's desires for the main character becomes something beyond merely menacing. They encounter people who act increasingly irrational and escalate into outright Lovecraftian madness. Ito's people recoil in terror, their eyes wide in disbelief, mouths agape at the rational world falling away from them to reveal a yawning existential chasm of horror that's the true face of the world they live in. Body Horror is a recurring theme and imagery in the stories: people are mutilated, warped, distorted and changed. They are usually ordinary people who have stepped into the Twilight Zone and can't escape. The characters in Ito's stories are punished for the smallest infraction, being curious, stepping out of normal bounds out of curiosity and paying a horrible price.

SMASHED ©Junji Ito Asahi Shimbun Publications Inc. They get even more clammy and claustrophobic as the collection goes along.

A high school girl who wants to lose weight wakes up every morning with tiny bite marks all over her body and finds herself losing weight and blood… An unfunny comedy act by two creepy women causes their audiences to die laughing… A pair of hikers discover a town plagued by a phantom flood with endless victims… A mysterious syndrome locks heartbroken people into poses that turns them into living statues… and these are the least gross and creepy of the stories. Smashed consists of thirteen stories, some longer than others with titles like 'Bloodsucking Darkness', 'Death Row Doorbell' and 'I Don't Want to be a Ghost', which show Ito is not messing around.

Smashed book junji ito