Face Meat by Bonten Taro
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publisher Site – Living the Line

Release: May 20, 2025

This is a creative collection of fourteen dark and creepy tales. It’s full of monsters, curses, killers, folkloric themes, and death. Many, but not all, of the stories are placed in Japanese settings — e.g. the wild west and 19th century Europe are also featured. (And some of the stories seem to be of ambiguous setting — presumably on purpose.) Most, but not all, of the stories feature supernatural elements.

It’s a translation of a manga, and isn’t reformatted, such that one will need to get comfortable with the “backwards” reading that such books entail. The art is mostly line drawn and lightly shaded black and white, with a few color pages (mostly story covers) in sepia-reminiscent tones.

I found the tales to be taut and disturbing and would recommend the book for readers of horror and dark speculative fiction. It is sexually as well as violently graphic –so, if you’re one of those weirdos who is ok with a severed head but scandalized by an unclad breast, this book isn’t for you.

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