Hino Horror 2: Bug Boy
Posted: October 27, 2007 Filed under: Hino Horror Leave a comment »When I read this post at Newsarama calling for talk of older releases in October, I thought it was an interesting challenge. The series I had in mind that I’ve been wanting to cover all month was Futaba-kun Change, which I was absolutely smitten with in my early years as a manga reader. But after reading Mantis Woman, I realized that October was the season for Hino Horror. For some reason, I skipped over reviewing all but the first one when I reading them a couple years ago. Really, the first one (Red Snake) is the only horror manga you will ever need to read. But the rest are still pretty good, and I’ll see how many I can fit in before the end of the month.
Bug Boy is the story of an outcast boy named Shotaro who fails at school and at life. He is in the fifth grade, and only wants to play with bugs. His teachers don’t like this, and his family (including two other siblings who get straight As) doesn’t like this either. Shotaro needs a hobby to escape this reject life, so he builds himself a fort inside a garbage dump and fills it with puppies, kittens, aquariums, and the like. One day, when looking forward to a school break full of nothing but hanging out with his pets, Shotaro vomits on his bedroom floor and finds a weird bug in the puddle. The bug stings him when he picks it up, and from then on his school break is filled with a leprosy-like disease where he loses his limbs and his skin melts off.
Eventually, Gregor Samsa-style, he wakes up to find himself a huge bug. Long story short, he goes feral and wonders around lonely in a variety of places, then is provoked into a murderous killing spree, sometimes revenge-motivated.
I haven’t read anything by Hideshi Hino in so long that I forgot just how insane his stories are. Thank you, Hideshi Hino, for being awesome.
