Uzumaki

Junji Ito's best-known horror work runs only three volumes. A coastal Japanese town called Kurouzu-cho becomes obsessed with spirals: in smoke, in shells, in the way people's bodies start to curl and twist. There's no monster and no real explanation. The spiral is just a pattern that the town can't stop generating, and it gets worse chapter by chapter. Ito tells it through Kirie and her boyfriend Shuichi, who watch their neighbors deform while the place slowly seals itself off. The horror is in the escalation and in Ito's drawing, which renders the impossible with the patience of a medical diagram. It builds toward one of the strangest endings in the medium.