Elena Rainn

KRKY Y

Kyrsten Iris

Coen Van loo

_ eshago@uw.edu

Watashi Wa Jigabudesu

Roman Bryzhatiy

Karl Halmos-Westram

Timothy Galvin

Ljsly Bernard

Ruby Brown

Dimitri Nuri

A pulsating psycho-thriller from Ryu Murakami, author of In the Miso SoupA renaissance man for the postmodern age, Ryu Murakami—a musician, filmmaker (Tokyo Decadence), TV personality, and award-winning author—has gained a cult following in the West. His first novel, Almost Transparent Blue, won Japan’s most coveted literary prize and sold over a million copies, and his most recent psychosexual thriller, In the Miso Soup, gave readers a further taste of his incredibly agile imagination. In Piercing, Murakami, in his own unique style, explores themes of child abuse and what happens to the voiceless among us, weaving a disturbing, spare tale of two people who find each other and then are forced into hurting each other deeply because of the haunting specter of their own abuse as children.

A mysterious videotape warns that the viewer will die in one week unless a certain, unspecified act is performed. Exactly one week after watching the tape, four teenagers die one after another of heart failure. Asakawa, a hardworking journalist, is intrigued by his niece's inexplicable death. His investigation leads him from a metropolitan tokyo teeming with modern society's fears to a rural Japan--a mountain resort, a volcanic island, and a countryside clinic--haunted by the past. His attempt to solve the tape's mystery before it's too late--for everyone--assumes an increasingly deadly urgency. Ring is a chillingly told horror story, a masterfully suspenseful mystery, and post-modern trip.

Can you both simultaneously love and hate something? Such is my reaction to Goth. The prose is great, the narrative interesting...but this book is creepy. Effing creepy. And, to be fair, I know it says "A Novel of Horror" right on the cover, but really, it's published by Tokyopop. How bad could it possibly be?Oh, silly, naive past me.The thing that makes this book so page-turningly horrific is not a focus on fantasy, like many genre-specific Japanese stories that American audiences are familiar with, but rather exploring the depths of human cruelty and psychosis and the awful, *awful* things people can do to one another. There are no cursed wells, no supernatural beings, just plain ole people being downright gruesome.This book is not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. I cannot stress this enough. That said, if you can get past a bit of torture porn, you'll discover that the real gem of this book is the author's ability to craft a shocking, engaging mystery full of twists and turns guaranteed to leave you guessing and keep your adrenaline pumping. The stories are interesting and well-crafted, centered around (but not exclusive to) two main characters who are neither likable or empathetic, but keep you engaged from start to finish.My only real complaint about this book, aside from the obvious gore (with still has me twitching in recollection), is the title itself. Having grown up with the "Goth" movement, having friends involved in the subculture, I was disappointed at how little the book actually had to do with Goths themselves. One character dresses primarily in black, and there's talk of death...and that's pretty much it. Love it or hate it, the Goth movement is so much more than that. The title is more of a selling point, a way for the author to reel in his audience with something flashy and familiar, a fact he readily admits and apologizes for in the author notes. If you're looking for a deeper exploration of the topic you're in for a rude (and rather grotesque) awakening. However, if you want to read a well-crafted collection of gut-churning horror stories, I'd recommend this book.

Such wonderful children. Such a beautiful mother. Such a lovely house. Such endless terror!It wasn't that she didn't love her children. She did. But there was a fortune at stake—a fortune that would assure their later happiness if she could keep the children a secret from her dying father.So she and her mother hid her darlings away in an unused attic.Just for a little while.But the brutal days swelled into agonizing years. Now Cathy, Chris, and the twins wait in their cramped and helpless world, stirred by adult dreams, adult desires, served a meager sustenance by an angry, superstitious grandmother who knows that the Devil works in dark and devious ways. Sometimes he sends children to do his work—children who—one by one—must be destroyed....'Way upstairs there are four secrets hidden. Blond, beautiful, innocent struggling to stay alive....

For more than three decades, Lucien — one of the most notorious characters in the history of the novel — has haunted the imaginations of readers around the world.  Remarkably, the astounding protagonist of Gabrielle Wittkop’s lyrical 1972 novella, The Necrophiliac, has never appeared in English until now.   This new translation introduces readers to a masterpiece of French literature, striking not only for its astonishing subject matter but for the poetic beauty of the late author’s subtle, intricate writing.   Like the best writings of Edgar Allan Poe or Baudelaire, Wittkop’s prose goes far beyond mere gothic horror to explore the melancholy in the loneliest depths of the human condition, forcing readers to confront their own mortality with an unprecedented intimacy.

The shocking thing about the girls was how nearly normal they seemed when their mother let them out for the one and only date of their lives. Twenty years on, their enigmatic personalities are embalmed in the memories of the boys who worshipped them and who now recall their shared adolescence: the brassiere draped over a crucifix belonging to the promiscuous Lux; the sisters' breathtaking appearance on the night of the dance; and the sultry, sleepy street across which they watched a family disintegrate and fragile lives disappear.

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