Kyoufu Kansen

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I recommend you not to read this manga, unless you want to read something so awful that it's more comical than scary.

There are 9 stories, each on its own and differing in story, tension and gore. All of them are very basic and most of them are just awful, like they were written by a child, stuff like dead person calling phones and you die if you answer the call. There are few which have only alright start, but that's it, the rest turns into worse.
The art isn't bad, such style is more suitable for horror, but it's still simple and doesn't have much ... details at all.
Besides terrible story, you get barely existent characters. They aren't on focus because the whole manga relies on some "scary" moments to create some tension. The only chapter where I felt little bit of personality was "Christmas present", which has a good side of showing relations between father and daughter, but everything else is a joke.
Overall, there were moments with some tension, but they were mostly cheap and everything else fell flat. I guess this manga was made for midschooler audience which searches for their first horror stories. Some chapters may look like somewhat promising idea, but they feel so unfinished or the later part came on force and it was just gore instead of some event which would make the story more interesting. On the other hand... Some chapters are somewhat entertaining how bad they are. Just imagine, a paper god which cuts the people who try to steal his statue, or Santa who makes canned reindeer food from bad children. I chuckled a coule of times, if this manga had more comical (and quirky) direction, I think it would become much more interesting. The rest of horror stuff go like this: There's some legend or an event, people die, the end. Nothing more than that.

Story:
Since each chapter is a contained story, it's a little weird on rating the story overall. That said, the work has some good stuff and some really bad stuff. I'm talking terrible. The bad stuff is spoiler territory so I can't get into that, but the real shame is that some of these things could have worked had they remained one-shots and were never compiled into a singular volume. For instance, the last story is, at it's best, a fairly interesting story. That said, it's still not all that special, it's just morbid with a twist.

Also, I feel it should be mentioned that horror isn't ... always full of sucky lives. Most of the stories have some of the same tropes where children live in bad homes. Or, we get an incredible amount of detail in the gore rather than the mystery of what's taking place. And, in other elements, we get a bunch of stuff that makes little-to-no sense whatsoever. It's a real mess.


Art:
Terrible but fitting. In some cases, the art looks pretty good considering the subject matter. While it becomes somewhat unnoticeable a lot of the proportions are way off and nearly every page has an issue. Again, this could be written off as stylistic intent, but it seems a little less self-aware than perhaps intended.

There's a story that has nearly 5 pages of stuff where I had no idea what was taking place because of the art. Also, there's this consistent blur that's added for shading, rather than shading in certain sections. It takes up one whole half of a panel and it's really quite annoying.


Character:
No character whatsoever. Certain characters are carbon copies, and other characters are carbon copies of other characters. It's a real mess. Only, like, 2 stories have their own real thing going on.


Enjoyment:
I mean, I don't think this was all that good. I was pretty mad about some of them simply because they were wasted potential, and others I had no idea what was going on. I guess, to put it simply, a work like this is striving VERY hard to be like Junji Ito's work. However, where Ito has a proper slope and scale when it comes to his pacing, while also knows how to be subtle and mysterious with his stories, Nori Ochazuki can't pace his horror for the life of himself, has no ability to create mystery, and fails in creating anything particularly memorable in the grand scale.

There's a lot of work that needs to be done here.


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