Liminality is a popular trope in modern horror. Look anywhere online and you’ll find pictures of abandoned malls, highway rest stops after midnight, or the current liminal du jour, the Backrooms. But what all of these have in common is their fleeting uncanniness—that these are meant to be areas we walk through without a second thought on our way to somewhere else. Sometimes that somewhere else doesn’t come. Sometimes we have to remain in those in-between spaces. And in that creeping dread, we find Junji Ito’s story collection, The Liminal Zone.

As mentioned in this blog previously, Ito is one of the great horror mangaka of our time. He combines the mundane with the horrific. Digging into these stories deeper reveals troves of terror. This collection is no different as he brings us women who can’t stop crying, a creepy headmaster at an all-girls Catholic school, spirits in a forest, and strange dreams.

All of these stories take place in more transitory areas in life: a street, a school, a forest, and an alley. But what Ito does with each is zoom in further into the uncanny of being in those spaces as the characters deal with crying corpses, people being turned to pillars of salt, spirits erupting in a flow from a dragon’s cave, and the broadcast dreams of a serial killer. All of his characters are caught between the real world and the sensation that they’re being pulled into something unreal. 

Ito has illustrated his horrors for longer than I’ve been alive and, despite that time, his style is instantly recognizable on the shelf—time has only helped to refine the strongest aspects of his storytelling abilities. You can see it in the directness of his panel layouts or the hatching under a character’s eyes to denote their deteriorating mental state. The Liminal Zone takes what makes Ito’s art so recognizable and iconic and builds further until we have a perfect distillation between four stories of what keeps us coming back to his work after decades.

Ito’s place among the masters of both horror as a genre and comics as a medium remains undisputed. The Liminal Zone dives further into his skills as an artist, but also shows us the precision in his storytelling—namely how he can make us connect almost instantly with any of his protagonists. As we’re deep into the spooky season already, there’s never a better time to slip into Ito’s worlds and feel that deep sense of dread that he’s able to perfectly bring to the page. 

Get excited. Get between.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.