Kazuo Umezu

Imagine The Lord of the Flies but instead of a bunch of British schoolboys, it's an entire elementary school full of Japanese kids, and instead of a desert island, it's a barren wasteland populated with giant killer bugs.

What starts out as a normal school day turns nightmarish - a mysterious event transports an elementary school and its grounds into a vast desert. The kids and teachers are left to figure out what's going on.

This book is pretty brutal, and gets violent quickly, almost to an absurdist level. It feels kind of like reading a fever dream. So many insane things happen to these kids, and throughout they're making all these adult decisions?? Meanwhile the actual adults lose it almost instantly. (You'd think teachers would care more about kids... right? WRONG.)

Despite that it hooked me and I was really invested in finding out what would happen to them, and why they ended up in a desert wasteland. The character development also improves rapidly - I hated the main character in the first couple chapters, but he improves a lot as the story progresses.

I definitely want to give the rest of this series a go.… (meer)

Once again, Orochi stalks some people whose lives are falling to pieces, occasionally using her supernatural powers of telekinesis and healing to intervene slightly, but mostly just observing. These stories are not good, and I'm reading them as historical artifacts from a well-known manga creator's career rather than for pleasure.

Prodigy ~ 2 stars ~

A desperate man tries to rob the Watanabe family, but things go awry and the infant son of the family, Yu, ends up getting stabbed. Years later, the robber is in prison, and Mrs. Watanabe bullies and abuses Yu to study harder and harder so he can surpass his aloof father in intellect. No one acts like a normal person, but everyone's crazy motivations get explained in the end, though it's quite a slog through multiple outlandish developments getting there.

Home ~ 1 star ~

A man learns you can't go home again in this dull mishmash of the "It's a Good Life" episode of The Twilight Zone and The Children of the Corn with a godawful "It was all a dream" ending.

Key ~ 2 stars ~

A little boy who lies all the time gets himself into "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" trouble. Too long, too dull.… (meer)

Orochi is a young woman with supernatural powers and a tendency to wander into other people's life to watch them self-destruct.

In the first tale, "Sisters," she uses mind control of some sort to convince two sisters living in a big old house that she is their maid. She then watches them fall apart and turn on each other as they count down the days to the older girl's 18th birthday, a day when a family curse will cause her to start turning ugly.

In the second tale, "Bones," Orochi is posing as a nurse when she promises a grieving widow that she will resurrect her dead husband. It plays out in a wildly bizarre variation of "The Monkey's Paw."

The storytelling here is too outlandish and strange for my taste, with people who don't talk or behave like normal humans and a protagonist who is a cipher with undefined supernatural abilities. Despite that, I'll probably pick up the next volume if it wanders into my local library.… (meer)