By: Hideshi Hino Publisher: DH Publishing Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: DH Publishing Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 188 Publication Date: September 30, 2004 Reading Level: Young Adult
Product Description: This tongue-in-cheek semi-autobiography follows the absurdly gruesome adventures of a lonely boy and his singularly crazed family. His escape from the madness that surrounds him is his collection of pickled animal and human body parts, to which he adds as one family member after another meet with a grotesque and sometimes terrifyingly funny death...
Typical Hino If you're in the mood for creepy and gory then Hideshi Hino is your man. There are few authors that are able to inspire this type of creepiness in me. He is not for the faint of heart. This collection is a good for those who want to be introduced to his work.
Hino rocks. Hideshi Hino, The Collection (DH Publishing, 2004; originally published in Japan in 1996)
I was hoping this was going to be a compendium of old Hino manga that never got translated into English. More fool me-- this is volume 7 in the Hino Horror series-- but what I got was delicious. The ad in the back for The Collection 2 describes this series as Hino's "dysfunctional memoir," and that's as good a description as any.
Now, before I go any farther, let me say that if you've never been exposed to Hideshi Hino before, either as a manga artist (best known in America for Panorama of Hell) or as a film director (he was responsible for the first few Guinea Pig flicks), you're in for something a bit different then you're used to. Hino has been on the cutting edge of horror manga for decades, and there's still no one even close when it comes to the good old gross-out. Reiko the Zombie Shop is probably closest on the buckets-of-blood factor, but Hino goes, and has always been going, places no one else would dare. (Interestingly, as far as atmosphere and style, I'd go outside the horror realm altogether and compare him to Yoshihiro Tatsumi, the master of existential despair.) Some of these panels, if you look at them long enough to get all the detail, are likely to turn even the most hardened stomachs, and Hino flings them at the reader with glee, personalizing the stories to add that little twist of the blade. Each tale here deals with a member of his family (father, mother, grandparents, little brother, and the most twisted, yet likeable, uncle I've come across recently in literature) and why a piece of that person's personal effects-- or a piece of that person-- ended up in Hino's collection. (Those who have seen Flower of Flesh and Blood will recognize the collection immediately; it's the backdrop of the final scene of the movie.) Suffice to say nothing good ever happens to a member of Hino's family.
If you've got the stomach for it, Hino is just the thing for when you're looking for transgressive (or whatever the kids are calling it these days) literature. I've been a fan since I first read Panorama of Hell back in the late eighties, and The Collection just adds to the fandom. *** ½
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