Mokumokuren

Six months ago Yoshiki's best friend Hikaru went missing in the mountains. A week later, he came back down, but something was a bit... off. "You ain't the real Hikaru, are ya?" Yoshiki finally asks. His best friend's body has been possessed by... something, and a few other people in town are starting to sense that something in the area isn't quite right. But while Yoshiki recognizes that the real Hikaru is dead, "Hikaru" looks and acts just like the real thing.

This book succeeds in creating a creepy, unsettling, disturbing atmosphere, which is only heightened by the obvious homoerotic element. I don't read a lot of horror, but this is the kind I like - where everything seems perfectly normal except for that one thing that is very, very wrong. Yoshiki seems a bit too passive in this first volume, but I'm curious to find out what happens next. What kind of creature has taken over Hikaru's body? And what kind of threat might it hold?… (mehr)

I'm more than a bit frustrated with this book. I'm not a fan of the pace and direction in which the plot is unfurling and the characters are hard to warm up to. It doesn't help that one of them seems to be possessed by a spirit entity of some sort.

It's a weird spin on yaoi where the possessed Hikaru Indou seems to be in love with lifelong friend Yoshiki Tsujinaka but also may be willing to kill him to protect his secret. Meanwhile Yoshiki just stumbles about in vapor lock, unable to accept or fight this new status quo.

My local library has the next volume, so I'm going to place a hold on it and see where it goes.… (mehr)