Did not finish. Got to chapter two of the third story and gave up. Very boring, unsatisfying endings and read as if written as a school essay. ( )

Mature-Content Rating: Language, Horror, Violence, Violence toward minors, Gore

“In my search for stones, I encountered a young man walking a mountain trail. I thought people were all horrible, so I decided I should kill him. So that’s what I did. I killed him.”

Zoo consists of eleven short horror stories told in a fashion only Otsuichi can create.

The title story, Zoo, is first. It’s more of a psychological horror. Readers enter the mind of a man who receives a picture of his dead girlfriend in the mail everyday, watching her decay over time while he insists to himself that he is the murderer.

In a Falling Airplane is about a hijacked airplane. The horror here is mainly about human condition. A not-college student, a woman, and a salesman are all tangled together on the plane and each one of them has a deep darkness.

The White House in the Cold Forest is my favorite, and probably by far the most gruesome. An abused boy lives in his aunt and uncle’s stable, spending his nights finding faces in the stone walls. When he grows up, he makes a house in the woods were he sees real faces on his walls.

The last story is Seven Rooms, where a murderer has, you guessed it, seven rooms where he stashes victims he kidnaps. However, his latest victim comes with a special and unintended package; his victims’ little brother.

All of the stories in Zoo aren’t ‘horror’ as much as they are ‘chiller’. The climax of the stories are subtle, moving back a curtain to show the reader what has been there since the beginning in his matter-of-fact style. It’s slight goosebumps and a shiver up your spine instead of needing to toss the book across the room and hide under covers.

Zoo isn’t the best of Otsuichi’s work, but the eleven short stories will give his new readers an insight to his writing style and it’s probably a good book to start with. Just remember, it’s always just a little darker than you think. ( )

11 original stories of horror, science fiction, and suspense.

Zoo*: Each day a man receives a photograph chronicling his ex-girlfriend's decomposition.

In a Falling Airplane: The lives of three unusual people converge aboard a hijacked airplane.

The White House in the Cold Forest: A fairy tale about an abused boy who grows up to become a monster himself.

Find the Blood!: A comic tale about a man who can't feel pain and who wakes up one morning with a kitchen knife stuck in his side.

In the Park at Twilight, a Long Time Ago: A very brief story about a special sandbox.

Wardrobe: A murder mystery concerning a secret that somebody is willing to kill to keep quiet. An intentionally misleading narrative that bears a second reading.

Song of the Sunny Spot: The last man on earth creates a robot to care for him in his final days, an allegory for people who have children.

Kazari and Yoko*: A story of twin sisters, one beloved by their mother and the other horribly abused.

SO-far*: A boy finds his parents in a peculiar state after a tragic accident.

Words of God: A boy has the ability to bend any living thing to his will.

Seven Rooms*: A brother and sister awake to find themselves locked in a small, featureless room, with only a small channel of water running through it.

*These stories were adapted into an anthology film of the same name, also recommended. ( )

This review is for the Japanese book I read but I'm posting this review under English translation available with has all the stories provided below and the one included in ZOO1. Once I read the stories from ZOO1, I'll add those stories to this version as well.

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I was first introduced to Otsuichi's story むかし夕日の公園で and was amazed that a 4 page story could be so intense. His imagination really shows through and his style, while quite simple (actually makes his books great for those learning Japanese who want to transition into reading novels), really helps the story shine through. Plus, the twists and turns in his stories are quite fun.

ZOO2 contains the following stories.

1）血液を探せ！(Find the Blood!)
2）冷たい森の白い家 (The White House in the Cold Forest)
3）Closet (Wardrobe)
4）神の言葉 (Words of God)
5）落ちる飛行機の中で (In a Falling Airplane)
6）むかし夕日の公園で (In a Park at Twilight, a Long Time Ago)

Each and everyone was enchanting in its own way and really had me turning the page.

1）血液を探せ！(Find the Blood!)
A man and his children go to a secluded mountain cottage as per tradition but when he suddenly wakes up and realizes he's been stabbed, he tries to figure out who has the greatest motive to kill him.

2）冷たい森の白い家 (The White House in the Cold Forest)
An aunt decides to kick out her sister's son, who now has to figure out how to survive in the forest. He starts to build himself a home but his use of material, human bodies, leads to a fascinating look at his mindset and leads us to quite the twist!

3）Closet (Wardrobe)
This is probably one of the weaker stories although still a fun twist. A woman and her husband go to the house of her husband's brother when the brother turns up dead, possibly at the hand of the woman. Did she really kill him?

4）神の言葉 (Words of God)
Two words: weird and creepy!
A boy discovers he has the power to command people's actions with a command. But as he seeks to separate himself from those around him, his commands become more and more frightening.

5）落ちる飛行機の中で (In a Falling Airplane)
This probably ended up being my favorite. A plane is hijacked but two passengers, instead of being scared, start haggling over the price of a drug that will let one passenger die peacefully instead of dying in a terrible plane crash. Quite an amount of dark humor in this one. Fun story.

6）むかし夕日の公園で (In a Park at Twilight, a Long Time Ago)
A young child plays in a park in Japan when he feels something frightening under the sand. This four page story packs quite the punch.

So I really enjoyed this. Page-turning, full of dark humor and fun twists. I compared the book to the English translation and while the translation leaves out a few sentences here and there, the translation is fluid. Otsuichi's style is straightforward making this a really easy read. ( )

Zoo is the second prose work by Otsuichi that I've read. It was published by Viz Media's Japanese speculative fiction imprint Haikasoru in 2009 with a translation by Terry Gallagher, making it one of the earliest releases to come out of the division. Haikasoru was actually a little worried that Zoo wouldn't do well; general horror doesn't sell as much as many other genres in the United States. Happily, Zoo ended up becoming a finalist for the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award for a single-author collection. The short story collection was originally published in Japan in 2006, which makes it the most recent of Otsuichi's works currently available in English. Even though another of his collections, Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse (also published by Haikasoru) received a later English release than Zoo, the stories are from earlier in Otsuichi's career. Having been impressed by his award-winning novel Goth, I was looking forward to reading Zoo.

Zoo collects eleven of Otsuichi's horror short stories, beginning with the titular "Zoo." There isn't really an overarching theme to the stories, per se. In fact, there is a rather pleasant variety. "The White House in the Cold Forest" has a fairytale-like feel to it while "Song of the Sunny Spot" easily qualifies as science fiction. Some, like "In a Falling Airplane" and "Wardrobe" are firmly placed in the real world. "Find the Blood!" has a humorous, albeit dark, bent to it while there is nothing funny about "Words of God" at all. Familial relationships are often important in the stories collected in Zoo, but that is especially true for "Kazari and Yoko" and "SO-far." Even the length of the stories vary. "In a Park at Twilight, a Long Time Ago" is just barely over two pages while the books finale, "Seven Rooms," is the longest at thirty-nine.

While the eleven stories are very different, they share some similarities as well. All of the situations and settings that Otsuichi has created are bizarre and disconcerting. The stories are also all told from a first person perspective (except for arguably one) and the narrators aren't always the most reliable. If the circumstances that the characters find themselves in are strange, they themselves are just as abnormal. It is frequently difficult to determine just where the border between fantasy and reality lies, or even if there is one. Another characteristic that the stories share, and I think this must be one of Otsuichi's signatures, is that they all feature a twist of some sort in their plots. Sometimes there are even multiple twists. Even though I have come to expect this from Otsuichi's work, the actual plot developments can still be surprising and quite effective.

The variety in the stories collected in Zoo is one of the book's strongest points. Each story has a unique feel to it and each narrator has a distinct, individual voice. My compliments go to the translator for capturing this aspect of Otsuichi's work so well. As with any short story collection, there will be a range in the quality of the individual works. The enjoyment of each story will also differ from reader to reader and will depend on personal taste to some extent. I, for one, didn't particularly like "Find the Blood!" until I realized how funny it actually was. But once I did, I enjoyed the story very much. Overall, Zoo is a great, creepy collection. I'm not at all surprised that it received an award nomination. If I wasn't a fan of Otsuichi already, I certainly am now. Currently, there are only two books by Otsuichi still in print in English, Zoo and Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse. I hope to see more of Otsuichi's works translated in the future.

Experiments in Manga ( )