Though Tomie and Uzumaki didn’t get the American remake treatment of other well known J-Horror classics, Junji Ito is still widely regarded as one of the masters of the genre. Smashed is the latest collection of his horror manga to be translated and released in the US.

The opening story is about a girl who develops an eating disorder and starts waking up with blood on her face every morning. Each of the stories begins with a run of the mill premise and turns on a supernatural element. It makes for perfect little pulp stories that are all ten to fifteen pages.

The only continuity comes from three stories near the end of the book. The first starts with a haunted house that turns out to be actually abducting people and continues by going back into the past of the haunted house’s childhood. It’s parked near the end of the book, but they are unrelated enough that it would have been better to scatter them throughout the book.

The art is gorgeous. Everything from monstrous plants to hordes of spirits is drawn in intricate detail. Ito’s line work is amazingly detailed, and the shading work adds the depth. If most of your exposure to Manga has been through Shonen series, Ito doesn’t have most of the tropes then can drag down action titles. These are tightly drawn stories with a lot of economy in their storytelling.

These are simple stories that work of quick twists and feel pretty pulpy in general. If you’re looking for a cerebral set of stories, this might not be the right book for you. It’s not that they are dumb, but they’re pretty straight forward: setup, introduce a supernatural element, ending. It’s formulaic, but that simplicity is part of what’s enjoyable about this anthology. It’s a breezy read, and it’s refreshing to read comics that aren’t bound into an ongoing narrative.