REVIEW: Shiver: Selected Stories (manga) by Junji Ito, translated by Jocelyne Allen, "Painter" translated by Naomi Kokubo

Shiver is a collection of 10 short horror manga stories (9, if you consider that one is technically a bonus continuation of another one of the stories in the collection). I bought my copy new.

Review:

As I usually do with anthologies, I'll write about each of the stories in this volume separately. The volume includes an afterword by Junji Ito and author commentary for all of the primary stories.

"Used Record" - Scat music from the afterlife - an old record everyone would kill to have. This was ok but would have been better if we could actually hear the music.

"Shiver" - What's the fear of holes called? Trypophobia? Well, this definitely checks that box. Cursed jade that infects people with holes that let in the wind and give an intense fear of insects. I found this to be one of the stronger stories in the collection, mostly because of the artwork.

"Fashion Model" - Some amateur filmmakers hire a couple models, one of whom is conventionally pretty and one of whom is maybe not even human. I was hoping this one would have more unexpected elements to it, but it was decent enough.

"Hanging Blimp" - People all over Tokyo are being hanged by blimps that look like their own faces. This was kind of creepy, but oddly funny as well. I laughed when the dad was all "Huh, that's horrible. Welp, I've got to go to work now!" Like, dude. Really?

"Marionette Mansion" - A whole family that's being controlled like puppets. This was weird and freaky, especially since I already find dolls to be fairly creepy.

"Painter" - A beautiful woman bewitches a painter. Meh, I wasn't really a fan of this one. It reminded me of Parasite Eve, for some reason. 

"The Long Dream" - Doctors are treating two patients, one a girl who fears death and one a young man who is having longer and longer dreams, to the point that he's becoming something inhuman. The body changes were a bit much, but is it really a Junji Ito story without body horror?

"Honored Ancestors" - There's a girl with amnesia, a boy with a dying father, and a huge monster that turns out to be [redacted]. This was some weird wtfery, which I know is a description that can apply to a lot of Ito's works, but still.

"Greased" - This focuses on a family living over their yakiniku place. Everything is oily and gross, and you can practically feel it oozing out of the pages. This one made my skin crawl. 

Bonus "Fashion Model: Cursed Frame" - A girl with a phobia of anything but full-body photos being taken of her becomes a model and has the bad luck to meet the model from the earlier "Fashion Model" story. Ok, so it's horrible of me, but I found this one to be a little funny. Don't mock the large and intimidatingly toothy model, folks.

REVIEW: The Anxiety Club: How to Survive Modern Life (nonfiction graphic novel) by Dr. Frederic Fanget and Catherine Meyer, illustrated by Pauline Aubry, translated by Edward Gauvin

The Anxiety Club is a nonfiction graphic novel. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Dr. Fanget looks at anxiety through the lens of three patients, Ismail, Mona, and Francois, each with different types of anxiety. There's some information about the history of the study of anxiety and what we know about the physiological and psychological aspects of anxiety. Then Dr. Fanget goes over the methods he used to treat the three patients introduced at the beginning of the volume, including information that readers might be able to use to help themselves. There's also a short section near the end about pharmaceuticals, although, from the sounds of things, Dr. Fanget preferred other methods of treatment.

The artwork didn't really appeal to me, but there were a few things mentioned in the treatment section that were new to me, or presented in ways I wasn't familiar with. All in all, this was a short, good, and potentially useful read. 

REVIEW: Manga for Success: Business Problem-Solving and Strategy (nonfiction book) by Takayuki Kito and Keisuke Yamabe, artwork by Enmo Takenawa

Business Problem-Solving and Strategy is nonfiction. I bought my copy new.

Review:

One more volume after this one, and I'll have finished the entire Manga for Success series! This entry was exhausting, but also one I might potentially have to consult again, if my Dean of Libraries was serious about having librarians put together a SWOT analysis of our library. Although one thing I got out of this book is that, with the way we'll be doing it, we're highly unlikely to create a good and/or useful one.

This volume, like the other entries in the Manga for Success series, alternates between textbookish sections and manga sections that illustrate the concepts using a story/example. In the manga sections, Kazumi Matsui is Head of Business Planning for Matsui-ya, a Japanese sweets company, and the daughter of the company's founder. Matsui-ya is in trouble, and Kazumi has been tasked with putting together a business strategy that can save the company and carry it into the future. However, her first attempt at a business strategy was rejected as useless, and now she's enlisting the advice of Takeda, the Business Planning Deputy Manager of Kikutani, a food-making company. Kazumi only spent three months at Kikutani, but she came to deeply respect Takeda's abilities during that time.

The first section of the text, "Analyze the Situation," goes over how to do a SWOT analysis and emphasizes the importance of treating it as more than some blanks you're filling out on a form. The next section, "Forming Strategic Options," goes over how to use the SWOT analysis to lay out strategic options for both a preestablished company (like Matsui-ya) and newly established businesses. After that, it's time to review and select options, and finally translate options into plans and actions.

I have to admit, I got lost more than once while reading this, and, despite the authors' efforts to lay things out in an easy-to-understand way, it was still an overwhelmingly large amount of information. It was still interesting, however, to see some of the behind-the-scenes stuff that likely went into, say, my university's Strategic Plan. It also helped me see some potential issues in the plan's creation and execution.

REVIEW: Prom House (book) by Chelsea Mueller

Prom House is a YA horror/thriller. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Kylie and her friends have rented a gorgeous beach house so they can party as much and as loudly as they'd like after prom. Unfortunately, not long after they start their partying, Kylie and her friend Aubrey discover Cam, Aubrey's boyfriend, dead. Kylie is convinced that he was murdered and that his murderer could still be somewhere nearby. When the cops arrive, however, Cam's body is gone, and Kylie and the others can't convince them that it isn't a prank.

Now the cops are gone, and everybody's stuck in the house as a violent storm hits and takes down a nearby power line. When yet another person in their group winds up dead, it seems more and more likely that whoever killed Cam is still among them. Can they find the killer before whoever it is claims more victims?

REVIEW: The Gate of the Feral Gods (book) by Matt Dinniman

The Gate of the Feral Gods is LitRPG, the fourth book in Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Everybody's on the fifth floor now, "The Bubbles." The remaining crawlers have been divided into groups of about 150 per bubble, with each bubble containing four zones, or quadrants, into which the 150ish crawlers are further divided. Some effort has been made to divvy up crawlers in such a way that all the powerful ones aren't grouped in the same bubble. Crawlers in one quadrant can't enter another quadrant until they've taken the castle located in their quadrant. Also, a bubble won't pop, and its stairs to the sixth floor won't be accessible, until all four castles in the bubble have been taken.

Carl, Donut, and Katia quickly discover that they're likely the most competent and certainly the highest level crawlers in their quadrant, "Air." They're in a relatively small desert location and will somehow have to work with the few other crawlers around them (some of whom are drunk and determined to stay that way) to capture their quadrant's castle, which is held up by balloons way, way high up in the air. If they're lucky, the crawlers in the other three quadrants in their bubble will figure out how to take their own castles. If they're not, Carl, Donut, and Katia will have more work ahead of them after the Air quadrant. They only have 15 days to pop their bubble and get to their stairwells.

This series continues to be lots of fun. In this volume in particular, the story expands beyond "what's the gimmick on this level?" and allows readers more glimpses of the machinations outside the World Dungeon.