From a distance, the seaside Japanese town of Kurôzu-cho looks peaceful and idyllic. Ferns sway gently on the verdant mountainside, the ocean laps gently at the black lighthouse, and Dragonfly Pond sits serenely at the town's center. But closing in, the reader realizes that something darker lies at the heart of Kurôzu-cho -- something beneath the sudden dust devils, the mysterious whirlpools, the inescapable convergence of the winding streets. A malevolent spiral contaminates Kurôzu-cho, churning dark thoughts within its inhabitants and goading them to the self-destruction that ends in the spiraling smoke from cremation fires. Junji Ito's first two Uzumaki graphic novels draw readers into the disquieting tale of Kurôzu-cho, infecting them with a heightened awareness of spirals and a case of the chills that may last for days.

Narrator Kirie Goshima lives contentedly in Kurôzu-cho, blind to its sinister element. Less of a protagonist than a witness to the horrors that befall those under the spiral's supernatural influence, the quiet teenager realizes something is amiss when she spies her boyfriend's father, Mr. Saito, staring avidly at an empty snail shell. Her boyfriend, Shuichi Saito, attends school in a neighboring town -- a daily escape which affords him the detachment to see how the spiral has infected his hometown and his family.

The first storyline, "The Spiral Obsession," details Mr. Saito's deadly fascination with any spiral -- whether a coil of wire or a special type of fish cake -- and Mrs. Saito's resulting violent spiral-phobia. Kirie listens skeptically to Shuichi's theories about the wrongness of Kurôzu-cho, but withholds judgment until his father declines into a housebound wreck and his mother flees reality into an aversion so strong that she takes scissors to her own body in an effort to rid it of spirals. As Mr. Saito tells Kirie's father, "They're everywhere once you look for them."

Some chapters from each of these two volumes stand alone as separate stories, similar in character to the best of The X-Files's monster-of-the-week episodes. The spiral exploits the characters' flaws in bizarre ways, often altering them physically as well as mentally. "The Firing Effect" and "Twisted Souls" show the heavy toll the spiral's flattery and perversion exact from characters who otherwise might behave perfectly normally. Ito goes particularly hard on feminine vanity in two just-desserts stories: in "The Scar," a vain, cold-hearted beauty's crescent-shaped scar twists itself into a disfiguring spiral, and in "Medusa," an attention-craving girl's hair takes on a life of its own. "The Snail" takes the reader to school with a new slant on the relationship between bully and victim. Despite its often-episodic nature, Uzumaki maintains continuity from tale to tale, building intensity from one to the next.

In the second volume, many stories veer away from the odd comfort of comeuppance stories to show the spiral's increasingly larger-scale, more violent, and less selective seductions. The circle widens to encompass anyone and everyone, and innocents dragged into the vortex suffer deeply. In "The Black Lighthouse," characters guilty of nothing worse than foolishness pay with their lives when they investigate the abandoned beacon's hypnotic light source. Characters trying to save Kirie from the threats of "The Umbilical Cord" and "The Storm" die merely because the spiral ensnares them. These events leave an indelible mark on Kirie; with Shuichi as her only ally, she must resist the evil she sees around her even as others call her a liar. The spiral cannot twist her spirit, but it stalks and menaces her.

None of these stories, however psychological, goes without grotesque images or eerie supernatural twists. In context, a mollusk or a hairstyle can induce shudders as easily as a trickle of blood or a rotting corpse. Ito spares nothing and no one; small children, kindly craftsmen, and glowingly pregnant women stand as much chance of serving as conduits of evil as becoming its victims. Of the twelve chapters in these volumes, a few border on camp, but only the gimmicky (if tragic) "Jack-in-the-Box" falls flat.

Ito's exquisite black-and-white pen work, with its elaborate backgrounds and realistic figures, represents Kurôzu-cho as just south of normal -- until he pulls out the stops with searingly disturbing images of the spiral's influence. Ito employs creative and memorable visions to show the spiral's erosive effects on the landscape, the little details of life, and the human mind and body. In the first volume, he accomplishes this with minimal gore, but the horrific events of the second volume -- particularly "Jack-in-the-Box" and the one-two punch of "Mosquitoes" and "The Umbilical Cord" -- require blood. He chronicles the unsettling sights through Kirie's wide-open eyes -- each lower eyelash lovingly drawn, creating a dewy, innocent effect -- as she watches Shuichi waste into hollow-eyed gauntness. When the events of the second volume chip away at Kirie, it's wrenching to see her trusting eyes bloodshot and to watch her sweet face take on the tension of painful secrets.

For both volumes, Viz takes the welcome step of reproducing the beautifully painted first four pages in full color, setting the tone of uneasiness in dark reds, unhealthy greens, and sinister purples. The second volume raises the bar further with an embossed cover and spine. A lighthearted cartoon featuring Ito poking fun at Uzumaki's concept (and at himself) closes each volume.

Ito lists his influences as "God of Horror Manga" Kazuo Umezu (who lent his name to the award Ito won for Tomie in 1987), Hell Baby manga creator Hideshi Hino, science-fiction/experimental novelist Yasutaka Tsutsui, and American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. Uzumaki is that rare work that captures the style of Lovecraft's horror, gradually unveiling the grotesqueries underlying everyday life, without pilfering its distinctive content, or calling everything in sight "Cyclopean" or "squamous."

"Spiral" to some translators and "Vortex" to others, Uzumaki inspired the 2000 live-action Japanese movie of the same name, which spurred positive buzz on the art house circuit, but has not yet been released to home video. The Uzumaki graphic novel, currently serialized in Pulp magazine, will conclude in Volume 3, scheduled for an October 2002 release. The final collection will include one story not published in Pulp.

Lovely despite its moments of looking-glass distortion, Lovecraftian with nary an "eldritch," Uzumaki shows a town in which the inhabitants become wound around the points of their own greatest weakness. The townspeople's all-too-common and all-too-human failings, warped and mutating out of control, at first keep the evil that befalls them from seeming random or gratuitous. But like a piece of fabric with a few tiny holes, Kurôzu-Cho is rent from weak point to weak point, unraveling until it seems it will fall to shreds. Although some of these vivid stories read as cautionary tales, and some read as straight-up horror, Uzumaki infects the reader with nothing worse than a case of the chills and the desire to read more.

Laura Blackwell lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she writes reviews and short fiction. Preparing this review has given her an irrational fascination with cinnamon rolls. Her previous work for Strange Horizons can be found in our archives.