Hauntress by Minetaro Mochizuki

TL;DR: Oh my god, this scared the pants off of me. Genuinely, I was vibrating I was so unsettled.
Source: Netgalley – Thank you so much to Kodansha!

Plot: Hiroshi Mori helps a woman out, against his better judgement, and things go very badly.
Characters: No one here is particularly lovable but you still REALLY don’t want bad things to happen because wow it feels bad.
Setting: So. Creepy.
Art/Layout: The majority of the art itself wasn’t my favorite but the artist did some absolutely amazing detail shots that really amplified the horror elements here.

Thoughts:

Being scared this badly by a manga wasn’t on my January bingo card but here we are. Hauntress is a decidedly horrifying story of a stalking with an open and ambiguous ending. A woman pounds incessantly on a neighbor’s door till Hiroshi offers her his phone thinking that will take care of it and end the problem. I promise, it doesn’t.

I’m a chicken, okay, I scare pretty easily though I do consume a lot of horror manga and enjoy a good movie every now and again. I’ll say that before I say I was shaking a little when I finished this. The art, while not my favorite had a very good unsettling feeling to it. It was creepy and there up close and detailed shots, especially around eyes, that really amplified this one.

The ending is open, the story unclear and that makes this worse. I didn’t love Hiroshi but I didn’t want anything bad to happen to him! Now I’m stuck sitting here thinking about how this could possibly have gone… and not wanting to answer the doorbell when it rings. If you like horror manga I recommend this.