Shiki Review: Screw Twilight already

I’ve been rather busy these few days and I’m predicting this would be my last post for the coming week.

For today, Shiki!

Well, a little background information about this obscure manga…

This series is about village with a population of about 1300 people, and during one fiercely hot summer, many mysterious incidents happened one after another...

There you go! Ripped right from the Onemanga page! To be honest, don’t expect this manga to be one with tale after tale of supernatural happenings, it’s a continuous manga with one sole storyline running. To cut it short, this manga is about vampires. Yeah, I know, a bloody cliché.

But what I like about Shiki is it’s execution. Instead of presenting itself as the usual vampire invasion, it follows more of a mystery format, where you follow the main characters (the village doctor, the village priest and a teenager who just moved into the village) as they unveil one thing after another about the vampires. They go by trial and error to see which of the myths about vampires hold true, like how they tried driving a stake through a vampire’s heart as an experiment. (In case you’re wondering, that one worked)

However, this manga has a serious downside to it- because of its mystery-like premise, the manga moves really slowly. After all, if you’re Shiki’s mangaka, there’s really not much you can hide from the readers when it’s just about vampires going around sucking people’s blood. To make up for this, the mangaka makes the plot move at a snail’s pace, which is good/bad depending on how you see things.

The starting phase of the manga was, to me, the most exciting. Especially since the manga doesn’t explicitly tell you it’s vampires at work, you start to speculate exactly what is going on in the village, where villagers present initial symptoms of lethargy, before slipping into Anaemia then sudden death. It was amazing really. I mean, how many manga can scare the shit out of you?!

This one surely did.

If you’re weak hearted/minded, and manga like Detective Conan somehow scares you, please read this. I take great pleasure in imagining people squirm in their beds at night.

PS: Oh, I just realized I have a draft of a review for Ao no Exorcist. I have to add a couple of pictures to that one before posting it. Looks like this won’t be the last post of the coming week after all~!