What destiny awaits them after the screaming?

What fate awaits when death is not the end? A group of four university students stumbles upon a deserted, decaying village deep in the mountains only to find an enormous perpetual motion machine still at work there. Before they can answer the questions of who made it and to what end, the friends begin to disappear, one after the other. Another story sees the return of the strange Hikizuri siblings! A girl weighed down since birth by an invisible burden meets the odd siblings and moves in with them in order to understand the truth about herself. But after a string of bizarre occurrences, the siblings' uncle appears on the scene…

The Liminal Zone 2 has story and art by Junji Ito. English translation by and lettering by . Published by Viz Media (March 25, 2025). Rated OT.

MrAJCosplay
Rating:

It wouldn't be a manga guide without another collection of Junji Ito works. Unlike a lot of other collections, this one seems to focus on the prevailing theme of a community-based force built over time and how it can be an incredibly dangerous thing to confront. We have weird families, inexplicably cursed dust haunting a city or an entire village taken over slowly over time by the revenge of a single person. This collection emphasizes the idea of these family and community grudges digging themselves out from dark corners to haunt our main characters.

This haunting takes the form of a lot of body horror. There isn't much in the way of supernatural or uncanny creatures, as much as there are just different ways to distort these human characters. We have people being turned into perpetual motion machines, we have bodies melting from the grudges of families or others being consumed by dust. It's unnerving, and the imagery is sure to keep you up at night. Like a lot of other Junji Ito stories, the volume does suffer from most of these short stories ending rather abruptly. There isn't so much resolution to these stories as there are just characters getting away from the forces that are chasing them. I don't necessarily think there's anything in the way of satisfying resolutions to the problems that are set up in this. After reading so many collections at this point, I think that's just how Ito chooses to write his stories. If you're a classic horror fan, then this is something that you should check out.