Hideshi Hino’s The Collection 1 and 2
Hino Horror, Vols. 7 and 8
DH Publishers
Japanese Graphic Novel (Printed in USA)
English Language version

The Collection, volumes 7 and 8 of the Hino Horror series, seem superficially to be much the same in topic and structure as other Hino Horror books Oninbo and the Bugs From Hell, The Black Cat, Ghost School and Death’s Reflection. After all, The Collection, like these other works, is a group of short horror stories linked by a framing device.

However, The Collection is separated from these other stories by its autobiographical nature, and it’s this autobiographical nature that links The Collection with earlier Hino Horror titles The Red Snake and The Bug Boy, and reveals something about those books.

The Collection is structured like The Twilight Zone, with Hino playing Rod Serling, walking readers through his “collection” of grotesque items, using each item as a springboard into a new story.

Though the stories run the gamut from tales of bullying to the solace of pets to a child’s relationship with his parents, they all swirl in a demented constellation around Hino and his family.

Through these stories we are introduced to Hino’s family and their supernatural maladies. “The Spiderweb Tattoo” is the story of Hino’s pig-butcher father and the tattoo that covers his back and reminds him of his life as a soldier. We meet his mother in “The Embryo,” a twisted tale of sibling love, child abuse, and a conception as far from immaculate as it gets.

Hino’s grandparents appear in the stories “The Growth” and “The Chicken Head.” These stories will seem familiar to readers of The Red Snake and The Bug Boy as Hino’s portrayal of his grandparents is the same in all four books, with his grandfather beset by a gout-like growth that needs its pus drained regularly and his grandmother believing herself to be a hen living on a nest and warming eggs.

These portrayals are only slightly revised from the first two books to allow for the new stories in The Collection. When the reader encounters them, as well as the story about Hino’s sister, “The Red Flesh Bug,” which shares many elements with The Red Snake, it becomes necessary to view The Red Snake and The Bug Boy, along with The Collection, as autobiographical works.

Of course, Hino did not grow up in a world of mermaids, living tattoos, and growths that expel the souls of murdered yakuza. This is obvious. But, taken as metaphor, perhaps he did.

After all, it’s frequently noted that growing up can be horrific. And certainly the things children don’t understand about the adult world can be just as scary to kids as any monster to appear on the screen or the page.

Using one’s childhood as the basis for tales of terror and horror isn’t new. There are many examples of this, some of the best coming from the likes of Ray Bradbury and Stephen King. What’s new about Hino’s work, though, is his assertion of explicit autobiography.

Neither King nor Bradbury, for instance, wrote stories about little Ray or little Stevie and their adventures in a world of horror. They write fiction about characters, not vignettes about their lives. Nor did they show those adventures shaping the work they created as adults.

Hino does both in The Collection. Along with telling the tales of his “life,” he shows himself working on his manga, drawing inspiration from his “real” life as material for his horrific “imaginings.”

This makes the two volumes of The Collection, and to a certain extent The Red Snake and The Bug Boy, perhaps the only examples of horror-as-explicit-autobiography, which seems a promising subgenre of both horror and autobiography.

The stories in The Collection are drawn in Hino’s usual clean-line style, with heavy, thick blacks. The characters are lumpen and misshapen, with bulging, bloodshot eyes, and odd bodies.

The stories sometimes suffer from underdevelopment or feel cut short in service to the anthology format, but by and large, The Collection is an interesting group of stories shot through with deeply unsettling ideas and images of the tenuous journey that childhood, adolescence, and a nascent maturity leads us all on.

Sam Costello is a web developer and freelance writer. He runs Little Terrors, a blog about independent, international, and obscure horror movies, comics, and books. His works has appeared in Rue Morgue, PC World, CNN.com, Bitch, The Comics Interpreter, and his interview of Eric Powell, creator of The Goon, will appear in an upcoming issue of Horror Comics Review.