The Red Snake

by Hideshi Hino

A spine-tingling new Manga series from Japanese horror masters Senno Knife and Hideshi Hino. Senno Knife takes on Japanese urban legends in the horror compilation, Falsas Apariencias. In the first... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0974596108
• ISBN13: 9780974596105
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: DH Publishing
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.1" x 7.2"

Customer Reviews

Awesome! Awesome! Awesome!

This book was sick & I mean that in the most flattering way possible. Terrific art & an awesome read. I'm hooked on Hino Horror!

The Mirror Cracked

Volume one of the Hino Horror series involves a strange tale of a bizarre family and a strange house. The story opens with a frightened little boy telling us of the house he hates. It is huge and surrounded by a dark forest. He has never been able to leave the house, always running bach scared to a new section he did not know. One hallway is blocked by a large mirror. It is said by the boy's grandfather that the mirror prevents the demons on the other side from getting through. But even stranger than the house is the boy's family. Among them is a grandmother who thinks she is a chicken and lives in a big nest. The boy seems to be the only normal one in the house. One day the boy sees a crack in the mirror. He is terrified that the demons can now come through. The first evidence is a large red snake loose in the house. From there things escalate at a frightening pace as the boy becomes witness to terrible horrors involving his family. In the end we return to a narrative similar to the opening. This is a strange one. We never get any real idea of who these people are or what the house is. It sort of reminds me of The Sentinel but there is nothing to indicate that the family is watching or guarding anything. But despite all of that this still remains a very creepy story full of dark imagery and atmosphere. A pretty good choice to lead of this new series of Hino's work.

A MESSED UP FAMILY

The Red Snake is the first volume in the Hino Horror series put out by Cocoro Books, celebrating the achievements of Hideshi Hino, the master of Japanese horror manga. I don't know if I would actually called this first volume horror or a disturbing meditation on suffering, death, and abnormality. Oh yeah, that's what horror is! The narrator of this tale is a young boy desperately trying to escape his home that is surrounded by a dense forest. Everytime he tries to leave, the forest somehow always mysteriously makes him wind up back at his house. Why does he want to escape? If you only knew! For starters, his grandmother is insane and believes she is a chicken, even eating bugs and living in a nest she constructed from sticks. His grandfather has an enormous cyst or pus-filled growth on his chin the size of a bowling pin. The kid's father is psychotic who raises chickens. Innocent enough, but if the chickens don't produce eggs, the father decapitates them. The mother's main job in the house is to massage the grandfather's giant size abscess by rubbing it with an egg and even stepping on it with her foot to lance it. And then we have the kid's sister, who has a perverse obsession with bugs. On top of this cheerful set-up, there is a hallway in the house blocked by a mirror, behind which the grandfather says lurks abominable horrors. Like the house isn't filled with horrors already! When the narrator ventures behind the mirror in a dream, he finds that things can always get worse! Some of the images in this book made me almost not want to turn the page. But hey, that's what horror is for! To show you things you want to turn away from but feel compelled to look at. Hino does a good job of creating an alternate world somewhere in the depths of Hell akin to Dante's Inferno. If you're in the mood for a creepy story, check this out.