Presents 1
Posted: February 4, 2008 Filed under: Presents Leave a comment »I really, really didn’t want to try this one after reading School Zone by the same artist. School Zone was really terrible. Imagine my surprise when I enjoyed this volume immensely. She really knows how to write short horror stories, that’s for sure.
I had a few flashbacks to Bride of Deimos while reading this, which is always a great thing. Each story is only around 10 pages long, and for some reason, these are grouped by threes into “Presents” in the book itself. As far as I can tell, there didn’t really seem to be a lot of thematic relation, so I wonder if that’s just how it was in the original magazine.
At ten pages, they work really well as just brief, twisted tales of horror. The basic setup is that the main character didn’t receive a present for her birthday one year, so she stopped aging and has become some sort of wandering spirit of gifts. She runs across different people to whom presents have different meanings. Sometimes the stories are happy, most of the time they’re tragic.
Just so you have an idea about what the stories are like… well, one of them is about a little girl who is popular at school and is given presents all the time by her classmates. Kurumi (the main character) shows up and says she’ll give the girl a present every day if she’ll be her friend, and the girl accepts. At the end, it’s revealed that Kurumi has only been giving the girl gifts she’d received and forgot about. On top of that, she’d only been talking with Kurumi for months, who nobody else could see, so she’d fallen out of the good graces of her friends.
They’re all sort of like that, semi-tragic with a twist ending, which is what you might expect, but they’re fun to read. Two or so involve Kurumi’s life directly, and one even plays off the Urashima Taro legend. That made me dust off my Beautiful Dreamer DVD and watch it.
