Presents 3
Posted: June 22, 2008 Filed under: Presents Leave a comment »Time to polish off another horror series. Once again, I have to mention how much I enjoyed this series, especially since I thought I would hate it. School Zone just wasn’t that good, but this one was really nifty. It’s good that she stopped it at three volumes, though. While this volume was still good, it’s much weaker than the other two volumes, and the ideas are starting to get a bit blander.
The story I enjoyed the most was one about a girl with a plain face making friends with a pretty transfer student. She tries to be a nice girl despite the fact she gets teased all the time because the boy she likes appreciates this quality, but she goes over the edge when her friend starts to steal the boy away. Things happen, the friend dies, and she teaches the girl with the plain face how to put on makeup so that she, too, can be pretty. The twist at the end isn’t all that clever, but the final scene is pretty nifty.
There’s another good one about a woman who desperately wants a baby and visits a shrine where she is warned that the outcome of her child will depend on how sincere her mother’s love is. She gives birth to a rock, and things get weirder from there. This is one of those stories that is sad all the way through with a bittersweet ending. They’re rare, but they’re usually very good. This one’s more weird than good, and a little underwhelming, but I liked it anyway.
Kurumi, our present-less host, appears only a few times in this volume. She appears as a background character with a minor role in the first story, there’s a short story dedicated to her finding her way home (in the middle of the volume, so it’s more about the beginning of the end of the journey), once in a really lame friendship story, and once in a story about a creepy girl who knits and knits a scarf to try and capture the boy she likes. She keeps getting rejected, so she keeps knitting, and she keeps putting a little bit of herself in the scarf until… well, the inevitable horrible outcome. It was a good story, and there was a bonus Kazuo Umezu reference in it, so I liked it.
Awesome horror short stories to the end, basically. It’s definitely worth buying all three volumes, but the second volume is really the best one.
