"It's been a long time since my manga days, but Junji Itō makes me want to get back into it.

Uzumaki is a horror graphic novel about a town that becomes obsessed with, and possessed by, spiral symbols. I imagine Itō sitting there with the phrase "spiral into madness" in his head and then running with it to the extreme. It's a combination of graphic body horror-- freakish and grotesque mutations --and a creeping, eerie sense of wrongness.

The imagery will stay with me, but so will the overwhelming sense of inevitability that permeates the book. The spiral is a force that cannot be reasoned with or escaped—it simply is, an existential nightmare that erases free will and consumes all in its path. Strangely, I never once felt like the point of this story was to overcome or escape the spirals.

Each chapter introduces new and ever more disturbing ways in which the spiral takes over the town and the minds of the residents, all of it building towards a climax that is simultaneously unsatisfying and surely the only way it could end."