Romance and horror aren't really kissing cousin genres, despite the fact that they can both trace their origins back to the Gothic novels of the eighteenth century. Successfully combining the two into a compelling narrative, therefore, isn't necessarily an easy feat. But if that's what you're hankering for, look no further than Umi Shiina's I Want to Hold Aono-kun So Badly I Could Die. Shiina does an impressive job of melding the two disparate storytelling styles into a series that's both yearning and utterly upsetting at the same time.

The story follows high school second years Yuri and Aono. Yuri at first appears to be your typical rom-com disaster heroine – she's awkward, she's socially inept, and she'd like a boyfriend but believes she has little chance of getting one. When she meets Aono from the class next door and he helps her out, she falls hard for him, and although surprised when she asks him out, Aono agrees and over the two weeks of their living relationship falls for her as well. But things take a turn when Aono dies in a traffic accident on his way home, and Yuri falls into a deep, despairing depression. She's actually got a blade to her wrist a bit after Aono's death when he appears to stop her – as a ghost.

As it turns out, there's a lot more to his appearance and its link to Yuri's attempted suicide than it at first appears, and by the fourth volume of the ongoing (as of this writing) series, we're starting to see that nothing is as simple as it first appears when it involves a ghost. In life, Aono may have been a nice guy, but in death nothing is quite as settled as that, and there's a price for his continued presence in the living world. In most other stories of this nature, we'd have the reassuring feeling that Aono and Yuri could beat the dangerous elements of Aono's ghosthood with the power of their mutual love. In this story? Not so much.

There's an interesting use of the idea of purity across these four books, however. Aono learns that he can possess people (at some cost to them), but only one thing can end the possession: a perceived physical impurity. This runs the gamut of religious beliefs on what is “impure” – eating meat, for example, or even blood; Aono's first possession of Yuri ends when she gets her period, while another time a nosebleed forces him out. We don't know yet if sex will do the trick, but at one point the characters – which by this point in the story also include Aono's best friend Fujimoto – consider testing it out by having Aono possess Fujimoto to see if loss of virginity will prevent further possession of either party. They don't go through with it, but it's a measure of just how concerned Fujimoto, Aono, and Yuri are about the increasingly dark phenomena that Aono's continued existence is engendering.

That decision, which would require Yuri to sleep with the body of someone she doesn't love (Fujimoto seems to be falling for Yuri, but he's not comfortable with this either), speaks to the nature of how dangerous things appear to be growing as the series goes on. While volume one deals with some dark subject matter, by volume four it's clear that Aono doesn't have as much control over himself and his ghostly nature as he'd like, and this brings very real dangers for Yuri specifically. While “dark” forms of a character have basically become a staple joke in manga at this point, Shiina brings out the alarm inherent in the concept here, with Dark Aono presenting a true threat to the living characters, and not just those he knew in life. That he can't remember anything he does as Dark Aono is also worrisome, because Yuri isn't going to tell him no most of the time – and she's the only one who can actually see him. Shiina weaves together elements of both paranormal romance and horror in Yuri and Aono's relationship, going between almost sensual moments of them attempting to touch each other and bloody gashes manifesting on Yuri's body. Even if Yuri and Aono aren't fully aware of the danger, Shiina makes sure that we as readers are, even as they also ensure that a piece of us really, really wants the two to be able to be together once more.

I use the word “almost” to modify “sensual” above because, much as the text conveys the yearning of the characters, the art really isn't up to the task. It's more like what you'd see in something goofier like Don't Toy with Me, Miss Nagatoro, and it tends towards the awkward and stiff. Horror elements, which rely on festering designs that encrust characters' bodies, work much better than almost anything else in the series, and there are a fair amount of inconsistencies in how the characters are drawn from page to page, which at one point really gets in the way of an important change in Aono's ghost. It's truly unfortunate, because the story is definitely top-notch, but it's held back a fair amount by the art, especially as the plot ramps up.

Luckily it can't fully keep this story down, and the page-turning suspense overwhelms a lot of the other issues, like the art and Yuri's too stupid to live (TSTL) moments. Some of the latter can be explained by her depression, but others feel much less forgivable…until we meet her sister and get a clearer picture of what her family life has been. That makes volumes three and four much stronger than one and two, because what looks like TSTL moves over into something much more understandable. Even her desperate attachment to the living Aono-kun takes on a different hue when we see what's been going on in the background, and the uniqueness of unhappy families (each unhappy in their own way, as the quotation goes) looks set to become an important factor in the story, especially as it highlights how Aono and Yuri felt they finally really found someone to care about them – and why letting him truly pass on is so hard for both.

I Want to Hold Aono-kun So Badly I Could Die isn't for everyone. It comes with hefty content warnings for suicide ideation and domestic abuse, as well as a few consent issues, and in places the horror (not tied to any of those content warnings) can be very disturbing, even if you're used to the genre. But it's also a very successful combination of horror and romance, giving us both fear and the desperate wish for the two main characters to be happy, preferably together. The jury's still out on whether this will have a happy ending or not, but once you start reading it, it's hard to make that a reason to put the books down.