Nightmare Inspector 8

Ooh, I love this series so much!  I skipped a volume since the last time I read this, but the story’s episodic nature is very forgiving and I don’t seem to have missed out on anything.  There were less “plot”-related chapters than in the last volume I read (volume 6), but the short stories this time were better.  And a little worse, but the ones that were worse were still pretty okay, and the ones that were better were pretty awesome.

The best story involved a client trapping Tsukishiro in a clever dream-trap.  I was a bit disappointed when things didn’t work out quite how I wanted, but that didn’t make the story any less clever.  That was Tsukishiro’s only real appearance in this volume, but he comes up again maybe two other times for exquisite gags.

A couple other good stories involved a half-remembered chant from childhood and a haunting by a ghost that only the client could see, and another involving a ghost and a nightmare at an inn.  The inn story had some narrative problems, but it’s hard to deny the charm of a story that involves a diagram of the human digestive system drawn on a paper screen in blood.  Birthing blood.  There was also an excellent story about a girl in love with an elevator operator and a nightmare where he couldn’t escape the elevator.  That one was good simply because it wasn’t a nightmare situation at all, and I enjoyed the twist at the end.

Aside from the great horror stories, the other thing I like about this series is its sense of humor.  There were two chapters in particular that were exploited for all the gags possible.  The best one was at the end of the book, and involved Hiruko’s assistant Hifumi in an arranged marriage with a woman that looks exactly like him.  Gags include things like a good chunk of the chapter devoted to Hifumi running around naked in “clothes idiots can’t see,” Hiruko trying to put himself to sleep to escape the two enjoying each other’s company, an extended power rangers-type hallucination from another character in “invisible clothes”, and other simple, yet effective gags.

Another great thing about this series is that it seems to be wrapping up in the next volume.  9 volumes seems about right for something like this with minimal plot, and I’ll probably catch up on the past volumes before reading the end.  I’m just so impressed with it, since it seems like a lesser xxxHolic, but it’s not.  Nightmare Inspector is its own thing, and it’s really, really great at what it does.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.