We return to the pile with another graphic novel. Well, less of a graphic novel and more of a graphic album as this is a collection of stories that have been published over the years. So it’s time we dove into some of the most famous works by mangaka Juni Ito and his collection: Shiver.

Shiver is a lot of things. It’s a ghost story tinged with obsession and murder. It’s curses that have plagued a family for decades. It’s the uncanny staring at you from an open page to the point where it can’t leave your mind until it manifests before you. It’s years of trauma building until it becomes someone’s entire identity. It’s a dream so long you feel as though you’ve lived with someone for thousands of years, but it’s only been a single night. Ito’s work is a host of different horrors that stretch from the macabre to the ridiculous, but there’s always within them a kernel of some primal fear he’s able to draw out. We see something like that manifest in the titular story or in “Long Dream” in which both stories present us with transformations of the human body that don’t just look gruesome, but wrong—as though the human form shouldn’t be able to look like that. But the way Ito is able to capture so much in singular panels with such detail is just another testament to his skill. 

While Shiver collects some of Ito’s most iconic work, what immediately drew me to this volume was his included commentary for every story. If you’ve ever read or watched interviews with him, you know there is a singular way in which he approaches writing many of his best stories and that can be boiled down to: “hey, wouldn’t that be kind of fucked up?” His commentary on these stories shows us a bit more as he goes into some of the simplicity of what inspires many of these pieces, like the used record store near where he used to live or a story that his oldest sister told him when he was younger. And because of how Ito approaches writing these stories, he doesn’t have to develop beyond the initial idea as the story itself doesn’t require it. That simplicity and directness is one of the main reasons his horror is so effective in these short bursts.

When we consider that Ito has been a working mangaka for decades, it’s hard to overstate how iconic has work has become. Even if he’s considered a cult figure, if someone has a passing interest in manga, they’ve likely seen the panels that have ingrained themselves in the medium’s consciousness. It’s why we need albums like Shiver to help put stories to all those images we can’t ever get out of our heads. 

Get excited. Get spooked.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, 651, & 674) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.