Deserter: Junji Ito Story Collection

An ever-increasing malice. A mind-numbing terror. The seeds of horror are sown in this collection of Junji Ito’s earliest works.

A vengeful family hides an army deserter for eight years after the end of World War II, cocooning him in a false reality where the war never ended. A pair of girls look alike, but they’re not twins. And a boy’s nightmare threatens to spill out into the real world…

This hauntingly strange story collection showcases a dozen of Junji Ito’s earliest works from when he burst onto the horror scene, sowing fresh seeds of terror.

Editorial Reviews

*12/01/2021

Cosmic terror, body horror, dread, and madness abound in this collection of 12 short stories created earlier in Ito’s (Sensor) career. „Bio House“ opens with a young woman and a biotechnology researcher who share a „penchant for dining on the unusual“ sitting down to a meal before taking a series of completely bizarre, impossible to predict twists. „The Reanimator’s Sword“ progresses with similarly surreal, intuitive plotting, as a boy determined to capture a ghost ends up uncovering a dark family secret involving a supernatural entity with the power to revive the dead. In „Where the Sandman Lives,“ an aspiring novelist tells a young woman, Mari, „the other me that lives in my dreamworld is trying to get out into the real world.“ If that isn’t creepy enough, wait until the evil double makes his viscerally disturbing emergence. The final story, „Deserter,“ in which a family enacts an elaborate ruse to convince a military deserter hiding in their house that World War II is still raging nine years after its conclusion, stands amongst the very best work of Ito’s career. VERDICT Another exemplary volume from the internationally renowned master storyteller.
– Library Journal