Review: SCHOOL ZONE

It's the perfect time of year to look at yet another series from a legendary horror mangaka...just maybe not her best one.

SCHOOL ZONE (Sukuuru Zoon), by Kanako Inuki.  First published in 1996 and first published in North America in 2006.

PLOT:

It looks like just another ordinary school building, but within it boundaries are terrible things.  There are murderous ghosts, identity-stealing yokai, abandoned dolls, and more.  Only a few unlucky children can perceive these terrible apparitions, and none of them are quite the same afterwards.

STORY:

This is the third time I've taken a look at a Kanako Inuki horror anthology, and by this point I feel like I'm starting to get a real grasp on both her strengths and her faults as a mangaka.

One of her strengths is her ability to tie the individual stories in her anthologies together.  The events of each chapter in this book flow into one another, even as the perspective shifts from one child to another.  A background character might become the star of a later chapter, and the featured kid of an early chapter might reappear suddenly after two or three chapters away.  This gives the whole book a very cohesive feel.

Another strength is in her choice of horrors.  There's a couple of common threads to the various frights these kids endure: it's either common problems for grade-school children (bullying, travelling safely between home and school, being left behind after closing, rumormongering) or the irrational fears that a child might believe (ghosts, dolls that are secretly alive, fortune-telling games invoking bad spirits).  Inuki mixes and matches these concepts freely, further blurring the lines between reality and the spirit realm and thus heightening the dread these kids feel.

Her weakness is making these kids feel like distinct characters in their own right.  They have different looks and names, but for the most part they feel interchangeable regardless of their age.  Another weakness is the tone.  A lot of this is due to how Inuki draws people, but the whole book feels like one long histrionic scream.  There's seldom a calm moment to be found for the cast or the reader to catch their metaphorical breath, and it makes School Zone an exhausting read instead of a thrilling one.

ART:

As always, Inuki's artstyle is going to be the thing that makes or breaks this book for any potential reader.  The art here looks no different from the other books of hers I've reviewed, with its dense, dank backgrounds and strange, shrieking, doll-like kids with faces that only Hideshi Hino could love.  It's the character designs in particular that make this book feel so exhausting to read.  It seems like their faces are always stuck in a bug-eyed scream, regardless of what the tone of the scene is meant to be, and it undercuts the actual terror of the tales within.

RATING:

School Zone holds together well as an anthology, but it doesn't work very well as a horror manga because Inuki's signature style ends up undermining the terrors she tries to create.

This manga was published by Dark Horse Comics.  This series is complete in Japan with 3 volumes available.  All 3 were released and are currently out of print.