Uzumaki
2013
- death
- spirals
- comic books, strips
- comics & graphic novels, manga, horror
- spirals--comic books, strips, etc
- death--comic books, strips, etc
- pn6790.j33 i8713 2013
- 741.5/952
The story
Kurôzu-cho, a small fogbound town on the coast of Japan, is cursed. According to Shuichi Saito, the withdrawn boyfriend of teenager Kirie Goshima, their town is haunted not by a person or being but by a pattern: uzumaki, the spiral, the hypnotic secret shape of the world. It manifests itself in everything from seashells and whirlpools in water to the spiral marks on people's bodies, the insane obsessions of Shuichi's father and the voice from the cochlea in our inner ear. As the madness spreads, the inhabitants of Kurôzu-cho are pulled ever deeper into a whirlpool from which there is no return!
What it’s like
Dense black-and-white ink with heavy cross-hatching, fog-smeared coastlines, and panels that slow to a crawl on a single spiral, the page itself seeming to coil. The sound is silence and the wet drag of waves against rock, the kind of quiet that makes a town feel held in its breath. Its vibe is creeping dread turning into full-blown spiraling unease, the mood of a grey afternoon that keeps getting stranger. The pacing is patient at first, then accelerates as the obsessions spread from one household to the whole town, and the human bonds at its center, a teenage girl and her withdrawn boyfriend, are slowly swallowed by something they can't name. The intensity is high: graphic body horror, transformed and mutilated bodies, violent deaths and grotesque imagery rendered in close detail, with frequent dread and disturbing sequences rather than relief. It is not gentle and doesn't soften its endings. It suits readers who want surreal, claustrophobic horror in a single sitting, late at night, and who enjoy the unsettling logic of a fixed idea consuming everything around it.
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