People often say that Junji Ito’s skill as an artist sometimes exceeds his skill as a storyteller. His imagery is larger than life. His characters and plots are usually very stock. If that’s the opinion you have of Junji Ito, prepare to have it left utterly intact by this 2002 volume (which I read from scanlations, as it has no official English release), which features scary art and stories that are slightly more substantial than nothing.

The results are kind of scattershot. The opening story “The Woman Next Door” is probably the best thing on here. Our heroine Mimi finds herself sharing an apartment building with a strange and threatening woman, and it evokes a powerful atmosphere even if it doesn’t really have an ending. Straight after that we get the 11 page “The Sound of Grass,” which is as unsatisfying as a 0.5 course meal.

“Graveman” is a waste of paper, featuring one of Junji’s worst premises to date (a bodybuilder flexing his muscles in a graveyard) and far too little payoff at the end. I don’t know what he was thinking here. His filler isn’t usually this bad.

“The Seashore” takes a while to get going, but has a powerful ending and some great art. “Alone with You” is the tale of a dead mother who comes back to haunt her daughter, and it also gets the job done.

The volume ends with a frustrating story called “The Scarlet Circle”. Mimi has found an underground room in an abandoned house with a strange circle on the wall. Soon, she realises it’s a gate to another world. The story is really fascinating and spooky…and it finishes in what is a strong contender for the shittiest and most obnoxious Junji Ito ending to date. This is a slight step up from “She woke up and it was all a dream.” I don’t know if he cut the story off short due to a deadline or whatever, but the alternative is that he genuinely hates his fans.

From what I understand this volume was inspired by various Japanese folk tales. Fair enough. Japanese folk influences have always informed Junji Ito’s work (his story “The Red String” being a particularly obvious example). There’s a nice little afterword done in the style of those gag comics in Uzumaki where he explains his creative process. Too bad he doesn’t tell us where the ending to “The Scarlet Circle” went.

I wonder how much great literature we’re missing out on because of language barriers. Probably a lot. Whenever someone performs the task of hauling Japanese novels into the Western world, it’s like we’re being given a momentary glimpse into some ancient treasure room.

Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination is collection of early stories by Japanese mystery writer Edogawa Ranpo, as translated by James B Harris. As is always the case, Western terms like “mystery” fit him imperfectly. He is a thinker and a manufacturer of ideas. After reading this volume, my mind felt stretched, as if Ranpo had physically gotten in there and enlarged it somehow.

“The Human Chair” is astonishing, a bizarre tale about an ugly man who crafts a chair with a hidden space inside for him to sit. Finally, he can enjoy physical contact with beautiful women (unknowingly on their part), and he seems far better suited as a chair than as a human being. The story’s ending irritated me at first, but I’m now starting to believe it it merely clashes with my prejudices about narratives.

“The Psychological Test” and “The Twins” are dense and involved crime stories, told from the perspective of the criminal. “The Hell of Mirrors” dispenses with subtlety and unloads horror with both barrels, and manages to be as shocking and frightening as Poe classics like “The Black Cat.”

“Caterpillar” is the story of a soldier whose limbs have been blasted off his body and of the wife who cares for him. This was written ten years before Johnny Got His Gun but leaves a similar impact. Suehiro Maruo has made a fantastic manga adaptation of this story (check out Junji Ito’s take on “The Human Chair” while you’re at it). “Caterpillar” is tragic, not a story so much as a scenario that can only be followed to its inevitable unhappy conclusion.

But my favorite story is “Two Crippled Men”. Leisurely told and understated in tone, it is about a man who walks in his sleep…talks in his sleep…and eventually commits crimes in his sleep. The ending twists in a way that genuinely shocked me. This was the story where I began to believe that Ranpo is a genius.

Ranpo’s approach to these stories is very “Japanese”. Elegant, a bit baroque in his approach, but with a drive and focus that’s often surprising in its intensity. Someone should translate more. And still more after that.

“Cult writer” is an obnoxious term: often the “cult” consists of one person (the writer himself) and sometimes even he doesn’t like his work. Nonexistent UK author “James Havoc” is a good example of one, though, in that he exerts strong appeal to a very niche audience.  95% of readers will be repulsed, offended, weirded out, bored, or otherwise unengaged by what’s on offer here, but the remaining 5%…

Butchershop in the Sky is a compilation of the Havoc’s astonishing writing, which consists of two novellas (Raism, White Skull), a short story collection (Satanskin), some unpublished material, and some unwritten (!) material that exists in synopsis form. There’s also a foreword from Creation founder James Williamson, describing how James Havoc went missing in Japan after an epic drinking binge, and is now feared to be dead. Although from what I hear, he’s crashing at Richard Bachman and Jesus Ignacio Aldapuerta’s apartment.

Straight off the blocks we get Raism, one of the least readable things ever published. It isn’t written in English, it’s written in “James”, an arcane pseudolanguage constructed by setting Ed Gein, an 18th century Jesuit monk, and the Marquis de Sade loose in a bar fight and writing down their shrieks. “Skin pins decant pyhorrhea from cumulus cunts, derisive quarsars blind supplicants; all lovers suffused with cancers by a petulant olive bruise.” The entire novella is written like that.

Satanskin is more restrained: a series of short vignettes that often contain actual plots. It’s hard to call anything in this collection mainstream, but stuff like “Shadow Sickness” wouldn’t have seemed too out of place in Clive Barker’s Books of Blood, for example. Havoc’s prose is extravagantly purple, and his imagination takes him to interesting places (“White Meat Fever” is about a man who steals vaginas from women and implants them on his body somehow). Tonight, we have no sense of crime.

White Skull is James’ last and best work: a rollicking pirate novel that destroys all in its path. Tales of the Black Freighter, innit, except there’s no pictures.

The rest of the book is a mishmash of a drunken writer’s bottom drawer. There’s two of Havoc’s stories adapted into comics – I didn’t like Mike Philbin’s art. “In and Out of Flesh” is about people literally trying to have sex with bolts of lightning, and manages to be disgusting and compelling. “Zipper Fox” is the tale of a lesbian biker gang, James Havoc guest featuring Russ Meyer if you prefer, and it exists only in outline form.

The most surreal moment comes in “Gingerworld”, an aborted attempt at writing a children’s book. The ginger king of a ginger kingdom has a series of bizarre confrontations with his nemesis, Hag Helly. In one story, Helly literally steals his face while he’s sleeping. Not to fear, though – his manservant is able to construct a replacement face from skin flakes from his bathtub.

As far as I can work out, “James Havoc” is not dead but is merely the pseudonym of publisher James Williamson. He’s found himself in a bit of trouble over these past few months (according to some Creation Books writers, his business model is to publish your book, not pay you royalties, and perhaps threaten you with violence) and if any of that’s true, I do feel guilty for financially supporting him. But what the hell. If you read Butchershop in the Sky, you should feel guilty anyway.