The Liminal Zone

[cornerofmadness]

The Liminal Zone by Junji Ito

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I have to admit it. In spite of knowing that Junji Ito is considered a master of horror, I have found a lot of his stuff in the past to be leaning too heavy into the evil woman tropes and/or a little gross. This volume doesn't really do that as hard (just Madonna does and it makes sense in this case).

Ito's art is truly amazing pencil work, seriously beautiful stuff. It's clean and detailed and tends more to the Western style of graphic novel art than it does to manga in my opinion.

This hardcover manga has four longer tales, short stories (which in the afterword you learn were a new form of delivery for him and he was experimenting in length) The first is about the weeping women (former professional mourners, an idea that has fallen out of favorite). The second gives us a Catholic school complete with a pervy principal and the wreckage he leaves behind. The third takes place in Aokigahara, Japan's infamous suicide forest and is easily the weirdest of the bunch. (the protagonists are a couple there to die because he has a progressive illness and she wants to die for love I guess because we never really know why) And lastly is Slumber where dreams of a serial killer haunt a young man or are they merely dreams?

The stories are solid and creepy. I'm not sure however they are all that memorable. Ito himself laments in an overly honest afterword about being out of ideas and that these were culled from the dregs of his note books. He's been at this nearly forty years so needing a break isn't that shocking. That said, I did enjoy this one more than some of his other more recent efforts.



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A Haunted History of Invisible Women: True Stories of America's Ghosts

[cornerofmadness]

A Haunted History of Invisible Women: True Stories of America's Ghosts by Leanna Renee Hieber

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


If you're looking simply for a book on true hauntings and nothing more, I'll stop you here. This book isn't that. Yes, it has ghost stories some that could be true (such as that word applies to haunted places and ghosts) and others are most likely urban legends or made up out of whole cloth to cash in on the ghost tourism market. Instead this book looks at those stories through two lenses, one of historical context and the other a feminist context and this is what sets it apart.

At the end of the day, there a countless stories of women in white, cry baby bridges and women who have either lost a baby or killed it themselves, lost a love or destroyed it. They make up the bulk of the stories told in true haunting books and on ghost tours. I should know. I've been on so many across the world and read even further aboard than I've been able to travel. This is a fascinating look at why these stories impact us, why do women have a voice only after death in so many cases and the tricky line we toe using women's pain (and people of color or truly anyone's pain) as we commercialize the afterlife.

It's broken into different ghostly tropes, the mother, the fallen woman etc and looks at a few specific cases across the country, looking at what was happening with those women at that time and how/why these women were immortalized after death.

It was well worth the read. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC



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