Ghost Hunt

Review Date: 2007 July 29 08:59

Reviewed by: Azure

Released by: Tanoshimi

Publishing Country: UK

Author: Shiho Inada, Fuyumi Ono

Age Rating: 13+

Page Count: 192

ISBN-13: 978009950642

ISBN-10: 99506424

Summary

SPR continues it’s investigation into the President’s haunted mansion. Mai continues to have disturbing visions of death when she falls asleep. The team continue to investigate, as other investigators assigned to the mansion pull out or disappear the team have to decide if it’s worth continuing.

Review

This volume is a direct continuation of volume 6 so if you wanted to just drop into the series the previous volume would be a good place to start. Volume 7 is essentially the second part of a two book case. Events are really heating up as other researchers are disappearing. Their analysis of the house is throwing up more problems than it solves as it seems there’s probably yet another secret space in the house, but one they are sure is totally sealed off.The sealed room idea is a classic and seems to appear extremely often in supernatural manga. The whole mystery here of course is, what is inside the sealed room and how are victims getting in or perhaps more importantly how is whatever causing the disturbance getting out?

Like the previous volume the story really seems to flow much better. The characterisation is also a lot more interesting as little tidbits about each of the character. The horror imagery is again extremely overt, with the traditional blood writing on the walls and clawing hands. It also visits medical horror imagery easily the best and scariest images of the book. The links to horror classic Dracula really cheapened things, it wouldn’t have taken much more effort to invent a suitably evil text as the inspiration and source of the problems. It’s hard to believe that people wouldn’t suspect foul play when a house is owned by someone whose pen name is Urado a Japanese corruption of Vlad.


Ghost Hunt is a lot of fun, it’s exactly what you’d expect from this kind of horror series, no more and no less.

Rating: 7/10