Horror can be about fear of the unknown, but it can also be about turning the mundane into the unknown. About taking an everyday truth you rely on and making it something unsteady, something you can no longer trust. We trust our bodies, we trust the houses we live in and the people we love; turn those things foreign and weird, and you can create a horror more unsettling than any monster in the dark. Do this poorly, of course, and you settle on the merely ridiculous - something more silly than frightening, more absurd than macabre. Junji Ito's work pretty much always treads this line between the horrifying and the absurd - he finds horror in things most people see as bland and everyday, and this can result in both awful fear or abject silliness. But you certainly can't say he's not creative.

Fragments of Horror is a particularly clear illustration of this difficult line, since instead of diving deep into one horror concept, it offers a scattershot helping of many weird ideas. “Fragments” is a good name for this collection - the stories collected here aren't equal in shape and size, and some of them are more portions of stories or thought experiments, while others are fully realized narratives. Some of the stories here take one poignant or unnerving concept and elaborate it into a full drama or horror show (like “Gentle Goodbye,” which is less frightening than melancholy, a classic ghost story). Others riff on a weaker idea that can't quite sustain itself (like Wooden Spirit, a strained concept that never evolves past some fairly simple imagery), or simply exist for the sake of one stark or wild image (Futon, which at least has a brief length fitting for its very simple premise).

The stories are largely about taking one simple idea and running with it, and Fragments' best stories choose their ideas wisely. Red Turtleneck takes the classic fear of your head simply falling off your body and elevates it with stark imagery (a hallway full of hanging heads) and awful body-horror variations (a cockroach scrambling in your neck). Blackbird combines fear of dying alone and more gross-out horror with something far more existential and dark, creating a new variation on the monster that Will Get You Eventually. On the opposite end, stories like Magami Nanakuse and Dissection-chan have much less sturdy horror foundations, and often come down to relying on one shocking full-page panel.

Fortunately, Junji Ito is pretty darn good at creating shocking images. His stories are drawn in a flat, semi-realistic style that help the fantastical elements stick out. His reliance on body horror benefits from these very detailed, unnerving drawings, and though his characters can sometimes look very stiff, the weirder elements are depicted in creative, loving detail. There's an odd disconnect between the plain, almost draftsman-like quality of his backgrounds and the camp intensity of his expressions and monsters, a technique I'm not always sure works to his stories' benefit. His drawings are of a high formal quality, but sometimes feel like they could benefit from a little more informal personality, which might lend a little more humanity to his characters. As-is, it's sometimes difficult to invest in his stories to the point of not just being shocked, but legitimately frightened.

Overall, Fragments of Horror is a collection of ups and downs, reflective of a practiced creator but not quite as consistently frightening or immersive as I'd hope. Much of this comes down to the laudable fact that Ito takes risks - he tries to find horror in places others would not, and though this sometimes doesn't pay off, it can also result in truly original terror. All told, I'd say about half of these stories really succeed, but that the overall collection still demonstrates Ito is a horror creator worth paying attention to.