The pregnant corpses that birth living children are devastatingly sad the true horror is in the behavior of the head of the household and the societal structure that encouraged that abuse. In Keepsake, only the firstborn, the heir, is truly alive - all the other children are conceived on dead women and they are perceived as monstrous parasites by the rest of the household. It also inspired Keepsake, where Ito takes the idea of men using women as mere vessels for their heirs and mixes it with necrophilia, a recurrent taboo. An Unearthly Love (1926), a woman finds out that her husband is in love with a porcelain doll, and it has a fairly classic structure. The anthology contains two Edogawa Ranpo adaptations. Venus in the Blind Spot is the latest collection of short stories by horror manga master Junji Ito.Viz Media gave him the deluxe treatment with a gorgeous hardcover collection that includes colour. The brilliance of the cult is that it tries to crystallize, through killing and stitching, relationships that should be organic and flexible to be healthy. The climax of the story takes place during Coming of Age Day, a national holiday that honors all the young people that turned 20 that year, that end up transformed into naked ragdolls, a pile of discarded (but very social!) dead toys. With the approval of her father, she leads a club of students with the same interests, all of whom are in love with her. Mariko is the beautiful daughter of a famous UFOlogist and a scholar of the same subject.

This might be the perfect COVID-19 horror story (alongside The Licking Woman, a self-descriptive title if there ever was one), as it's about a shut-in hikikomori whose social anxiety saves him from a cult targeting anyone that's being social, killing the offenders, stripping them down and sewing them together. Finally, Venus in the Blind Spot, the tale that lends its name to the anthology, is a tragic look at the consequences of the male gaze. Billions Alone has some absolutely spectacular panels of massive amounts of people stitched together.

Venus in the blind