Review by Ian Keogh

Brain Damage collects four horror stories of varying lengths by Shintaro Kago.

Kago’s technique is to begin with an unsettling or uncomfortable situation and elevate the horror from there. Opening story ‘Labyrinth Quartet’ has four very similar looking women awakening in a locked and otherwise empty room. ‘Curse Room’ begins with a young woman showering and finding slightly altered items in her bathroom. In ‘Family Portrait’ a young girl is molested by her grandfather who runs away, and only ‘Blood Harvest’ begins in a normal way with a conversation between two young women stuck in a traffic jam.

While following a pattern at the start, the stories are inventively different, with Kago’s afterword offering insights, and revealing that elements of each remain deliberately unknowable. It’s going to irritate readers who want explanations and pay-offs. Beyond being used as a story point, death is a theme uniting all four stories, which can be seen as assorted considerations of haunting, be it haunted love or a more literal meaning. The unexpected awaits, with the best surprise being the initial disclosure of what’s going on in ‘Curse Room’, where further shocks follow in creativity aligned with logic not always applied in Brain Damage.

An unintentionally disturbing aspect is that all victims are women, and the way all women are drawn makes them seem younger than their activities would indicate. It’s uncomfortable beyond their circumstances, most apparent in the salacious ending to the otherwise creative ‘Family Portrait’. It’s bizarrely inappropriate, and provocatively offensive. Leaving that aside, Kago’s art is neat, precise, and always in the service of the story.

At double the length of the other material, ‘Blood Harvest’ concerns a detective investigating the impossible. It’s well set-up via recurring nightmare situations for a driver, but the breakthrough relies on a convenient explanation from someone whose expertise remains unknown, and if you don’t buy into it, what’s happening will seem silly, not terrifying.

The considerable creativity is offset by the poor attitudes to women and leaves Brain Damage interesting, but flawed.