Deserter by Junji Ito Review

Junji Ito’s story collection Deserter was only recently published in English a few months ago but it was originally published ten years ago in Japan. It explains why the art is a little less polished than his newer books but the stories remain as daffy and original as readers have come to expect from this creator. And, like the majority of Ito’s books, Deserter isn’t very good.

There were three stories that stood out to me - I wouldn’t say I liked them completely but they were more than just “whacky horror cliche blood arrgh” which makes up the others. A Father’s Love is probably Ito’s most serious story to date, dealing with child abuse in an allegory about a father who uses bizarre psychic powers to live vicariously through his children. It’s a creative way of portraying a difficult subject though it doesn’t make it that interesting to read either.

Unendurable Labyrinth has an intriguing premise of a couple of hikers stumbling across an extreme band of ascetic monks who are trying to mummify themselves alive for… no real reason. Because Horror! Bullied is the third story which is a weird tale of revenge with a creepy final image.

The other stories aren’t well constructed. It’s a pattern I’ve noticed with Ito’s books: his stories start well but always descend into hysterical horror cliches that rarely make sense and often give the stories an unintentional comedic aspect. Bio House is about vampires out for blood, Village of the Siren is about demons wanting human sacrifice because that’s what demons want, Deserter is about a haunted family, and The Devil’s Logic is about a cursed videotape that kills - I know, how original, eh?

Parts of stories can be mildly interesting - the eerie village in the Siren story, the strange plan the family hatch and stick with in Deserter, the idea of a dream version of you emerging into the waking world in Where the Sandman Lives - but other parts are underwritten or, as is usually the case, not explained at all, so they read as amateurish and silly. At their worst, they’re just plain boring like the woman scorned in Scripted Love or the guy who brings the dead back to life in The Reanimator’s Sword.

There’s usually at least one or two stories in a Junji Ito collection that stays with me, for better or worse, but I don’t see any of the stories in Deserter doing that - they’re on the whole a very forgettable and unimpressive bunch. I can see why this wasn’t published for a decade while other collections were published before it. If you’re gonna check this one out, don’t expect much from this attention-deserting book.