Deserter: Junji Ito Story Collection

by Junji Ito

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

If the cover doesn't get you, the sheer, bizarre terror of Ito's wild imagination surely will. What happens when a book character comes to life, or when a ruse goes wrong? This and more in one of the earliest collections of Ito's work.

An ever-increasing malice. A mind-numbing terror. The seeds of horror are sown in this collection of Junji Ito’s earliest works.

A vengeful family hides an army deserter for eight years after the end of World War II, cocooning him in a false reality where the war never ended. A pair of girls look alike, but they’re not twins. And a boy’s nightmare threatens to spill out into the real world...

This hauntingly strange story collection showcases a dozen of Junji Ito’s earliest works from when he burst onto the horror scene, sowing fresh seeds of terror.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781974719860
Publisher:	VIZ Media LLC
Publication date:	12/21/2021
Pages:	392
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

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. His titles include Tomie and Uzumaki, which have been adapted into live-action films; Gyo, which was adapted into an animated film; and his books Fragments of Horror, Frankenstein, Lovesickness, No Longer Human, Remina, Shiver, Smashed, and Venus in the Blind Spot, all of which are available from VIZ Media.

Ito’s influences include classic horror manga artists Kazuo Umezz and Hideshi Hino, as well as authors Yasutaka Tsutsui and H.P. Lovecraft.

He is a three-time Eisner Award winner. In 2019 his collection Frankenstein won in the “Best Adaptation from Another Medium” category, and in 2021 he was awarded “Best Writer/Artist,” while Remina received the award for “Best U.S. Edition of International Material (Asia).”

Editorial Reviews

★ 12/01/2021

Cosmic terror, body horror, dread, and madness abound in this collection of 12 short stories created earlier in Ito's (Sensor) career. "Bio House" opens with a young woman and a biotechnology researcher who share a "penchant for dining on the unusual" sitting down to a meal before taking a series of completely bizarre, impossible to predict twists. "The Reanimator's Sword" progresses with similarly surreal, intuitive plotting, as a boy determined to capture a ghost ends up uncovering a dark family secret involving a supernatural entity with the power to revive the dead. In "Where the Sandman Lives," an aspiring novelist tells a young woman, Mari, "the other me that lives in my dreamworld is trying to get out into the real world." If that isn't creepy enough, wait until the evil double makes his viscerally disturbing emergence. The final story, "Deserter," in which a family enacts an elaborate ruse to convince a military deserter hiding in their house that World War II is still raging nine years after its conclusion, stands amongst the very best work of Ito's career. VERDICT Another exemplary volume from the internationally renowned master storyteller.

Library Journal