Pet Shop of Horrors 9

Matsuri Akino – Tokyopop – 2004 – 10 volumes

I broke my own rule and went ahead to the tenth volume after this one. It was good. Really, really good.

More and more hints about D’s identity are dropped. Small things mostly, everything from telephone conversations with his father to flashbacks to his childhood to… judgment calls on his part. The volume ends with an intense and bizarre story about a 16-year-old girl who thinks that she is destined to be with D. It’s an interesting story, because it shows both a human side and an inhuman side. It reveals without really saying much. It’s characteristic of the series, and somehow, is not as infuriating as it sounds at this late stage of the game. As I said, I wasn’t really expecting to know much about D, since who he is isn’t terribly significant to anything that goes on.

There are one or two standard chapters in here too, one about a gift of a tiger to a young girl getting pushed around by an underworld kingpin, and another about a family that keeps finding their pets suffering from unfortunate, gristly deaths. This one had a nice twist at the end, and while it wasn’t completely a surprise, it was interesting that the story worked both with and without the twist.

The other character-centric story was about a young woman seeking vengeance on Leon for the death of her boyfriend, a man Leon killed while trying to apprehend him. Chris and D are both involved. It’s a pretty dark story, and I do like that these plot-centric stories grow increasingly dark and closer to the characters as the series progresses. Previously, it was more a matter of all the characters getting involved in someone else’s escapade, and we’d get some character development when we saw how Leon and D reacted differently to the situations. But now, it’s all about the lives of Leon and D.

It’s also increasingly strange how close the two are. They bicker like a married couple, and Leon is increasingly buddy-buddy with D. He still puts up a front of trying to bust him, but he’s over at the pet shop all the time, and… I’m not entirely sure that Chris and Leon don’t live there, because Chris is over there all the time.

But I know there’s more to that story, and volume 10 proves it. The last volume was a strange ride, giving me all sorts of stuff I wasn’t expecting. But that’s a story for next time.