Smashed is the latest collection of short horror mangas by acclaimed (though I don’t know why!) creator Junji Ito, none of which were especially good! I won’t go through each and every one in this bumper book but no single story stood out over the others - they were all pretty dumb!
And that’s the thing with Ito: he’s has no concept of subtlety - which I’m sure is what appeals to some of his readers - but the horror is so over-the-top that it undermines any potential scares and makes it hard to take the stories seriously. Like in Soichi’s Beloved Pet where a creepy kid turns a cute kitten into a monstrous demon - it’s not enough to just do that, Ito has to then turn the cat into some kind of EMP bomb (not really but that’s what it looks like on the page)?! It’s so silly.
Still, I was mildly curious to find out how bonkers Ito would take each story so I can’t say I was too bored by them. But I also wasn’t very engaged either given that the stories are so very simplistic and shallow: people are haunted by ghosts/something until they die or go crazy - repeat ad nauseam!
While the character models look the same here as they do in every other Ito book - he has a very limited range - he can definitely pull off an unsettling image here and there. The vampire bat hopping across the floor, the ghost of the death row prisoner ringing the doorbell every night to apologise to his victims’ kids, the caged demon boy, and the people posing like Christ on the crucifix were all strikingly weird-looking.
Junji Ito fans might find enough in Smashed to make it worth their while but they’re probably going to be the only ones who’ll enjoy this book.
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