Moan Junji Ito Story Collection

In this short-story collection, the master of horror and page-turning jump scares delivers another selection of creepy, skin-crawling tales with unsettling endings that will leave readers with chills. Ito's stories include a transfer student and supernatural occurrences, a family with obsessive cleanliness who is plagued by clogged drains, vampiric entities, a disturbing pursuit of beauty, a search for a lost passenger airliner, and recovering a high-school time capsule. Ito continues to use common fears and everyday settings as kernels for his frights, which helps with believability and relatability while he bends reality to weave in the surreal and horrible. The illustrations reinforce the grotesque and the appalling--Ito spends significant time on the details of the monsters and gruesome scenes, especially when they lead into reveals on the next page or into larger spreads. There are fewer body horror stories in this collection than other Ito volumes, making this a great selection for high-school audiences searching for more scares.