Ghost Hunt

Review Date: 2008 January 28 15:21

Reviewed by: Azure

Released by: Tanoshimi

Publishing Country: UK

Author: Shiho Inada, Fuyumi Ono

Age Rating: 13+

Page Count: 208

ISBN-13: 978034549824

ISBN-10: 345498240

Summary

Volume 9 concludes the investigation into the Yoshimi family residence begun in book 8. The Yoshimi family appears to suffer a terrible curse every time the house changes hands. Members of the household act oddly and die. As the head of SPR ( Shibuya Psychic research) Naru falls pray to the strange presence haunting the house, the stakes rise dramatically.

Review

s with previous stories it becomes pretty clear that the pace is much faster in the second half. This means that much creepier happenings occur as the haunting escalates. The team also begin to look for explanations of the phenomena surrounding the house. Was it the killing of a group of priests? The arrival of a strange and holy object? The team urgently try to find just what has caused the haunting so they can deal with it.

With Naru out of action the rest of SPR get licence to use their differing paranormal abilities, this includes John Brown western style exorcist, Ayake the self proclaimed Miko, and Lin who uses Chinese Qigong. Though it often boils down to a bit of flashy chanting, its interesting to see these different approaches and it's a shame that the benefits and pitfalls of each style aren't explored more deeply.

Its also in this volume that the imagery gets really creepy, the culprit ( to not give spoilers) is weirdly unsettling, it's difficult to explain why;it's simply that the feeling of unease becomes palpable as the feeling of 'wrongness' grows. Sometimes the actual mood of a horror story is the most unsettling part.

Enjoyable, and certainly one of the better horror manga but could have down with compressing down to one volume.

Rating: 7/10