Books: Uzumaki Vol. #2 (2nd Edition)

The second volume of Uzumaki spirals outwards — sorry, I had to say it — from its original premise to encompass one truly bizarre extension of the “spiral curse” after another. Some of them have only the most tenuous connection to the basic concept — what do mosquitoes have in common with spirals, for instance? — but Junji Ito continues to find ways to make his oddball premise stick. I had a mental image of him sitting back with a broad smile after inking each month’s segment, confident that he’d found yet another way to turn a simple design pattern into a vortex of all-consuming horror.

Sometimes the connections to the core inspiration of the story aren’t that obvious. The opening tale operates in this vein: it’s about a compulsive prankster whose corpse becomes animated by a stray car suspension spring, and it veers towards being merely silly instead of creepy. But the vast majority of the other chapters more than win back any lost confidence you might have, thanks to Ito’s amazingly perverse imagination for the macabre.

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