Junji Ito’s manga UZUMAKI is a weird and wild horror story about a Japanese town plagued by the “spiral curse,” which begins to spread until it threatens to devour everything. I absolutely loved the art, original story, and haunting strangeness of it.

The manga is a collection of series of interconnected stories about Kirie Goshima, a teenage girl whose boyfriend, Shuichi Saito, believes their town is haunted by uzumaki, the spiral and mesmerizing secret shape of the world. Time after time, she sees people become obsessed or infected by spirals. As the incidents mount, the spirals grow until becoming a whirlpool threatening to consume everything.

In some ways, the story reminded me of PI, a 1998 film about a man who discovers a number that is one of the names of God and drives him to the brink of madness. UZUMAKI has the same level of originality and strangeness, though it takes its concept much farther, straight to an unflinching, very satisfying finish.

If you like graphic novels/manga and horror (or anything just plain weird), check out UZUMAKI. It’s a lot of fun.

K.S. Merbeth’s WASTELANDERS, which puts her novels BITE and RAID in a single volume, tells the story of Kid, a young girl struggling to survive another day in a post-apocalyptic American wasteland until teaming up with a band of misfit marauders straight out of the Frankenstein child of THE ROAD WARRIOR and the game BORDERLANDS.

The stories are packed with post-apocalyptic tropes and adventures with Kid finding her way in a marauding tribe, where morality has little survival benefit but where she does discover a personal code. Along the way, she toughens up to become a raider herself, as the gang plows through one problem and enemy after another. The fun is in the fact this gang are the bad guys, a mini version of Lord Humongous’s army, and they’re in it to survive and have a good time doing it. Merbeth does a good job making these raiders sympathetic if morally gray, prone to betrayal, and occasionally cannibalistic, largely by showing how worse everybody else is in this insane post-apocalyptic world.

While WASTELANDERS might have benefited with an overarching plot where by unlocking a dormant morality or through naked self-interest they make the world a better place, the stories offer plenty of fun romping around this Mad Max world trashing enemies and surviving by the skin of your teeth, with plenty of action. Overall, WASTELANDERS is just good fun.

“Lovecraftian” is a mythos that feels overly familiar to me and therefore has to be done really well for me to fall under its spell. By “done really well,” I mean take Lovecraft and portray it in a contemporary way that conveys the feelings of mystery, dread, and horror, without sounding hackneyed or borrowed. TRUE DETECTIVE played with the Yellow King mythos in just such a way. A more direct and just as powerful example is THE ENGINES OF SACRIFICE by James Chambers.

This novella collection tells four dark stories firmly rooted in the Lovecraft mythos but told in a rewardingly fresh, direct style. Imagine somebody took everything you loved about Lovecraft, pared out everything that made it boring or dated (like presenting male characters who are decidedly masculine but not toxic), and then made it fresh and contemporary; the result is James Chambers’ excellently poignant horror collection.

All four stories are remarkable, but my favorite hands down is the title novella, “The Engines of Sacrifice.” Like the other stories, it stems from Lovecraft’s mythos while taking it to an insane level and rolls out like a thriller with numerous psychological as well as physical twists and turns. In this story, writer Rowley Cray lives in a world slowly gone mad, controlled by a genocidal totalitarian government, and subsumed by Lovecraftian creatures. The dead tell him their stories to share, but they want more; they have a very special purpose for him. Unfortunately, so does the government. Navigating various parties who see his stories as the key to altering the reality they live in, Cray must capture the power of words and make the ultimate choice.

If you enjoy horror or Lovecraft in particular, there’s plenty in this collection to enjoy.

In Emily St. John Mandel’s STATION ELEVEN, a new swine flu sweeps the planet, killing 99% of humanity and leaving a dazed few to live in the ruins and hopefully rebuild. On the plus side, the writing is beautiful, with snappy dialogue and engaging characterization. On the negative side, all of the characters connect through a central character who dies before the apocalypse begins, and whose story, largely irrelevant, occurs solely in the past, resulting in a tale that feels disjointed and never quite comes together.

Obviously, I had mixed feelings about this one, though overall I liked it quite a bit. The story begins when Arthur, a Hollywood A-lister now playing King Lear onstage in Toronto, dies of a heart attack. Through him, we are introduced to a number of other people, some of whom survive the impending viral apocalypse, some who don’t. A second thread tying many of the characters together is their exposure to a limited-edition comic, a labor of love produced by Arthur’s first wife, called STATION ELEVEN, about people living on an Earth-like space station in deep space after their planet is taken over by aliens. Some of these people are now with the Traveling Symphony, a traveling acting and musical troupe trying to keep art alive in the post-apocalyptic world.

Much of the book is devoted to Arthur’s life and relationships, which connect the characters so delicately in the past and present that it feels overly designed, except for one major character we’re introduced to at the beginning, who disappears for much of the book and oddly never interacts with the others. So those looking for literary fiction with a genre twist a la Margaret Atwood are likely to be delighted with STATION ELEVEN, while those looking for apocalyptic fiction with a literary twist may be disappointed, as this story leans heavily to the literary. While there are so many things that could have be done with keeping music and theater alive in a post-apocalyptic world, this theme largely goes unexplored. I can’t help but wonder what the novel would have been like if it had been about a musician or actor in the Traveling Symphony, past and present, rather than an actor who dies before the apocalypse. The climax, such as it is, passes by in a flash, and the story wistfully peters out at the end without any major thematic or other statement.

That being said, wow, what a writer. STATION ELEVEN is beautifully written. The dialogue is punchy, the lonely atmosphere in which people crave human connection and a meaningful life is wonderful, the characters are all interesting, and the way humanity goes out with a whimper is engaging. In every scene, the author made me care. Overall, I quite liked it for what I received from it. I just wish it had more strongly tied together, particularly in regards to plot and to an extent theme, and told a more coherent story.