Is horror mangaka Junji Ito a real life Dorian Grey? He’s 52 years old, but looks younger than me. It’s as though the digits of his age imbibed cheap sake and switched position on a drunken dare.

Why doesn’t he age? Clearly, black magic is afoot. I don’t know the specifics of his deal with the devil, but I’m they involved eternal youth, in exchange for nobody ever being able to translate him to English.

The evidence is overwhelming: the landscape is littered with failed attempts to get this man in English. In 2001, ComicsOne licensed his 16-volume Horror Collection series, released the first three in English, and then vanished from the face of the earth. In 2006, Dark Horse licensed his 12 volume Museum of Terror collection, again released three, and then cancelled the series for reasons unknown. In 2011, an online manga website called Jmanga opened with Ito’s Voices in the Dark as one of its launch titles…and folded, less than two years later. Most recently, Ito was conscripted to work on Silent Hills, and then the project was given a brutal gangland-style execution by Konami. The Junji Ito Curse is not to be mocked.

Viz has licensed several Ito properties in the past, and (perhaps foolishly) has now given us one more: Fragments of Terror. Frankly, I think they are now living on borrowed time. You don’t bring Junji Ito to English and escape the consequences. I expect to wake up tomorrow and find that they’re filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, their headquarters have been overrun with flesh-eating spiders, and their CEO’s athletes’ foot is flaring up.

Fragments of Terror collects one-shots from the last few years of Ito’s pen. They’re a mixture of inventive JG Ballardian concepts, scary campfire dread, horror movie camp, and Ito’s excellent art. Not everything in here is great, and it doesn’t disguise the “serial manga fingerprints” as well as it might, but it’s still a worthy addition to the slim lineup of English Ito titles.

Affairs start with “Futon”, a story about a mattress that induces hallucinations when you sleep on it. Not one of Ito’s best efforts. Very dull and one obvious, with a pat, tie-a-bow-on-it ending. “Wooden Spirit” is stronger, with Ito drawing an inspired link between the curves of a woman’s body and the natural geometries of plants, trees, et cetera. No real attempt at a story, but the execution and art is impressive.

Issues of tone from one story to the next soon jump out at the reader. The understated “Wooden Spirit” gives way to the comical and gruesome “Tomio – Red Turtleneck”, followed by borderline shoujo bait in the sappy and sentimental “Gentle Goodbye”, followed by the ultra-violent “Dissection-Chan”. The stories whiplash erratically from one mood to the next. Why put the stories in chronological order? Why not take advantage of the opportunity to craft a bit of an arc, to build and release tension?

The best and worst story in the collection sit right next to each other. “Magami Nanakuse” involves a girl journeying to meet a mangaka she admires, and then…well, remember “Ghosts of Golden Time”? It’s that crap all over again. Very awkward and ham-fisted attempts at social commentary here, as well as a lack of focus or direction.

But “Blackbird” is a great. Intelligent, well paced, scary as hell. A man is rescued after apparently spending a full month trapped in the wilderness with two broken legs. How has he survived his ordeal? Things keep building and building, and the ending satisfies without explaining too much. I’d put this story up against anything from Ito’s classic period (1997 to 2002 or so).

In the end, if nothing else Fragments of Terror offers a statement to the fact that, despite all the events of the last ten years (marriage, fatherhood, pacts with the devil, etc), he’s still capable of serving up the goods. He’s still in love with waifish female leads, elaborate dresses soaked in blood, grotesque imagery, and stories that make no sense but have you nodding in perfect agreement.

Ito might be in cruise control mode, but he’s still here, and Fragments of Terror is an interesting if uneven collection from an underrated mangaka who’s still making inroads to the English market. No doubt Viz’s corporate headquarters will be smoking and charred rubble by tomorrow, but they did a good job here.

I miss PUAHate. Its denizens used to drive me up the wall with their stupidity…but they brought something to my life I can’t live without. Their raw, naked patheticness. Their willingness to air laundry that wasn’t just dirty, but irradiated and coated in sarin gas. When you get the lowest of the low together, nobody has anything to hide, and all the walls come down. The site’s radical honesty felt incredible, like mother’s milk, except PUAHate was the complete opposite of having a woman’s nipples in your mouth.

PUAHate was too good to last. One permavirgin on a shooting spree later, and the site is one with the dust of Tyre and Sidon. Why should we pay for one dipshit’s mistakes? Its like the real life version of this Onion article. I want to hunt former webmaster Nicholaus down and demand satisfaction.

Anyway, the grieving and mourning process has ended, and I am ready to find a replacement for PUAHate. But where? What sites allow you to admire the very worst humanity has to offer?

1. Reality Television

No deal. Reality TV is so obviously set up and manipulated that it’s not even clever to joke about it any more. Even the shows that aren’t outright staged have an ambience of fake-looking TVness that locks me out of the show. The camera angles, the lighting, it’s too clean, and too professional. It’s cinema verite with the verite left on the cutting room floor. Modern reality TV is like a petting zoo where you touch the animals through a thick layer of polythene.

I do enjoy the little moments that show the reality behind the facade.

Here’s an example: someone from Jersey Shore mentioned in an interview that all the housemates take huge, hour-long showers. Why? Because the bathrooms were the only place in the building free of the prying eyes of the camera. They were trapped inside a panopticon. That’s a turn-on. That’s reality TV. Someone should make a reality TV show that capitalises on that. Where the contestants are told they’re filming a documentary or something…but it’s actually private footage from their bedrooms and bathrooms that gets put on air. That would be exciting.

Until then, I don’t think it’s possible for reality TV to be less interesting.

2. Reddit’s /r/cringe related boards.

The concept is simple. Minor social missteps, captured in film and image for all eternity. This man, crossing the street too early. This man, who left his flash on. This man, who won a contest to lose his virginity to a porn star. Yes, cringers are almost always male.

These places are great but they’re missing another important element: running storylines. In PUAHate you’d get to watch people change over time. Aexexx went from advocating “LMS Theory” (that is, your value to women is determined by your Looks, your Money, and your Status), to a more hardline “FACE Theory” (that is, Face and Age Conquer Everything – your value to women is determined by your facial attractiveness and you not being too much older than her). You’d see Pokerface abandoning his attempts at being a poker pro, descending into a morass of depression, and returning occasionally to threaten suicide. All this cringe stuff has names blurred out, and everything is censored and anonymous. It’s like a sketch variety show vs a soap opera. Good for what it is, but it’s not the same.

3. 4chan, 8chan, whateverchan

Similar problem to the above. People just come and go. Everyone’s anonymous. No “characters”.

4. Remnants of PUAHate

The thing I miss about the old-school web is that pages tended to stay around longer. You could find a website that hadn’t been updated in years, and as long as someone was paying the web hosting bill, it would still work. Even if someone consciously deleted stuff, you could usually find a few bits and pieces (remember browsing someone’s FTP tables after their index page was deleted?)

Now, everything’s driven by PHP databases, and when something breaks, EVERYTHING vanishes into the void. When websites are down, they really are down. Deleting fucking everything has never been easier. Thousands of records can be erased with a few mouse clicks, or by sheer accident. And don’t get my started on that Bobby Tables douchebag.

PUAHate comes from the later era, so 99.9% of the site was swallowed by Nicholaus’s frantic attempts to avoid incrimination and stay out of jail. But you can still find bits and pieces – the website was too bizarre and surreal to not leave a mark on the internet.

PUAHaters were obsessed with male pattern baldness, and you could often find them slinging obscure bits of theory on MPD support forums. Here’s one. PUAHate legend Chinpoko apparently liked to hang out on these websites, and was often banned for traumatising men with his auguries of doom for their sex lives.

Bodybuilding.com was another of their benighted haunts. I note that the word “PUAHate” gets asterisked out when you type it there, something that usually happens only under extreme circumstances (come to think of it, I believe Elliot Rodger posted on BB.com as well).

But perhaps the best legacy of PUAHate is contained in Elliot Rodger’s own memoir (of sorts), My Twisted World. Inside it you will find the entire ethos of the site, bar one important thing: he decided to do something about it.

“I soon found out the name of the beautiful girl in my math class. Her name was Brittany Story. Being the obsessed stalker that I was, I looked her up on Facebook, and what I found shattered my already wounded heart to pieces. She had a boyfriend. Not only that, but her boyfriend was the type of boy I have always hated and despised: a tall, muscular surfer-jock with a buzz cut. As I looked at all the pictures of the two of them together, I shivered with pure hatred. I could physically feel the hatred burn through my entire body. I wanted to kill both of them, and I was capable of doing it. Brittany Story should have been mine, and if can’t have her, no one should! I fantasized about capturing the two of them and stripping the skin off her boyfriend’s flesh while making her watch. Why must my life be so full of torment and hatred? I questioned to the universe with turmoil roiling inside me. I screamed and cried with anguish that day. My housemate Spencer heard it all, but I didn’t care.”

This is a 1991 anthology from Creation Books, back when they were Creation Press. Their basic approach is to pack various surrealist authors whose names start with B (Burroughs, Bataille, Banks, Britton) into a dense ball and insert said ball through your horizontal fissure at 300 miles per hour while giving the middle finger to boring lamestream media conventions like “design” and “print quality”. The pages in my copy are literally falling out. It’s poetic, as if the collection’s depravity is causing it to explode in my hands. Bad luck that I lost the page of contents, because now it’s hard to find my favorite stories.

The best one is the reprint of Ramsey Campbell’s, “Again”, which features flies, a corpse, and a gestalt: a terrifying and suffocating sense that you’re lost in a repetitious and unending cycle. Autoerotic strangulation via Moebius loop. Creation does come across as a “getting all my buddies in print” vanity enterprise at times (it helps if you understand that many people in this book don’t exist, and are pen names for other authors), but writers like Campbell and Burroughs hint at an ambition to be more than that.

Terence Sellers furnishes an excerpt (from The Correct Sadist) that is short and twisted. Not fifty shades of gray, one shade of black. David Conway’s story “Eloise” (which you can find collected in Metal Sushi) melds the old and romantic with futuristic anodyne and chrome. I’d already seen this story in one of his collections but was glad to read it again. Is this its original printing?

Then there’s “James Havoc”, contributing “In and Out of Flesh”, a fragment which appears in a more polished form in his Butchershop in the Sky compilation (and again as a full-blown graphic novel form in 2009). A teenage biker gang commits sadistic sex murders, literally writing return to sender on the bones of their victims. This early version is oddly unHavoclike – adjectives are relatively few, there’s no wild Burroughs-esque “literary guitar solos” a’la Satanskin, and generally it’s more like a story than is usual for this writer. The end of the collection promises a forthcoming (and still unreleased) children’s book from Havoc called Gingerworld, which (again) appears in fragments in Butchershop in the Sky.

Then there’s the usual filler. James Havoc’s girlfriend. A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it excerpt from Jeremy Reed. Prose from Clint Huczulak. Poetry from Aaron Williamson. They fulfill one purpose: increasing the page length beyond chapbook size into an actual anthology. None of these works were memorable in any way.

The final story, Paul Marks “And the Sun Shone by Night”, woke me from my torpor with its sheer brutality. Its first few pages make it sound like a a heavy handed tract about animal testing, but the following content is so extreme that goes straight past being a moral fable and becomes a Gommorral fable, if you like. Who’s Paul Marks? His generic, unGooglable name makes me think he’s still another pseudonym.

Red Stains is a nice look at the prime years for one of Britain’s early “extreme fiction” publishing houses. While their later compilation Dust emphasises surrealism, this one focuses on gore and violence. These were good times for Creation. In later years, a more apropos title would be Red Ink.