Heaven's Door

Heaven's Door collects eleven short stories Keiichi Koike drew between 1984 and 2001, finally gathered in 2003. The subject is almost always the same: someone takes a drug, or nearly dies, or sits too long in the dark, and the border of ordinary reality gives way. Koike trained partly in France and it shows. His linework owes a clear debt to Moebius and to Otomo, dense and precise, packed with crosshatched detail that makes a hallucination look engineered rather than smeared. These are not feel-good trip stories. They are closer to reports from a place the narrator is not sure he should describe.