There is no logic, no clear reason these things simply happen and there is nothing that can be done about it. Basically the whole town falls apart and no one can leave. The row houses mentioned earlier on in the first volume play a significant role in this volume. The chapters aren’t nearly as episodic as in the past two volumes Ito is bringing the story together toward its conclusion. Volume Three is the longest of the trilogy. I believe that in Uzumaki, “Poo-tee-weet” serves as an omen to Kirie that her life is only going to get worse. There was a Kurt Vonnegut reference here that made me smile: Kirie woke up to hear birds outside her window singing “Poo-tee-weet.” In Slaughterhouse-Five, the birds ask this just after poor old Edgar Derby is shot, in response to the horror of the situation. The fact that a book can give me that reaction, tells me that it definitely fulfills its promise of being dead creepy. I found myself making a face similar to the one I make when I take cough syrup–grossed out with a nasty flavor in my mouth. I’m not sure this is the best book to read while eating. I read most of this book while on my lunch break one day. Eventually, they were penned up so that they couldn’t roam freely around, because who wants that, right? The bump became a shell and he turned into a snail. It didn’t happen to everyone, just a certain few, starting with one rather slow-moving boy who then developed a spiral-shaped bump on his back. Snails have spiral-shaped shells, after all. The one that stuck out the most to me in this volume was the people who turn into snails.

It’s just that there’s so many stories to tell about this town of 6,000. Volume Two is rather episodic in nature, much like Volume One. The really creepy part is that in my dream I was totally unconcerned about this aberration, much like the girl seems to think the spiral is perfectly normal, that it in fact makes her better. I had a dream once where there was a hole in my face. And the scar sort of bores into her head so that she has this ever-growing spiral going deeper and deeper into her head. In one chapter, a girl has a crescent-shaped scar in the center of her forehead that spontaneously becomes a spiral-shaped scar. It’s such an incredibly clever concept, that an obsession with a shape can take on paranormal aspects such that it truly is quite spooky. The book features a town called Kurozu-cho that is being haunted by spirals. All month long in October, we will post reviews of books with spooky themes, whether outright horror or just uncanny.

Spiral into horror