The one that stuck out the most to me in this volume was the people who turn into snails.

It’s just that there’s so many stories to tell about this town of 6,000. Volume Two is rather episodic in nature, much like Volume One. The really creepy part is that in my dream I was totally unconcerned about this aberration, much like the girl seems to think the spiral is perfectly normal, that it in fact makes her better. I had a dream once where there was a hole in my face. And the scar sort of bores into her head so that she has this ever-growing spiral going deeper and deeper into her head. In one chapter, a girl has a crescent-shaped scar in the center of her forehead that spontaneously becomes a spiral-shaped scar. It’s such an incredibly clever concept, that an obsession with a shape can take on paranormal aspects such that it truly is quite spooky. The book features a town called Kurozu-cho that is being haunted by spirals. (Dec.All month long in October, we will post reviews of books with spooky themes, whether outright horror or just uncanny. Ito's b&w drawings are well done and scary, but the book's essentially an empty thrill. She doesn't attempt to find a solution, and there's barely any character development or plot. She reacts to each ordeal with fear and manages to escape before the spirals show up yet again.

Characters enter the story only to become part of the town's body count, and Kirie, a constant survivor, is no more than a vehicle for the next spooky outbreak of deadly spirals. Ito knows how to make readers' hearts drop and stomachs turn, but once the scare factor wears off there's not much more to the book. When she's at home or school, things seem normal, but the sudden contrasts between the ordinary events of everyday life and this mysterious invasion of chaotic, threatening spirals makes the horror all the more shocking. Readers witness these chilling disturbances through Kirie, a wide-eyed schoolgirl with a pixie cut, whose world is drawn in typical, lighthearted teen-romance manga style. The spirals even begin to infect people's bodies, leaving grotesque spiral voids. Soon, things intensify: a lighthouse throws out spiral beams at dusk babies are born, only to sprout spiral-capped mushroom-shaped appendages from their stomachs one man becomes obsessed with spirals until he goes completely mad. When corpses are cremated, the smoke forms a black spiral in the sky, and the clouds form swirls like those in Van Gogh's The Starry Night. The townspeople of Kurôzu-cho are being haunted by a strange infection of spirals.

Uzumaki spiral into horror