The town's spiral possession starts manifesting itself in increasingly grotesque ways. When Shiuchi's mother throws away her husband's spiral collection, he begins to emulate spirals, culminating in a death that's both cartoonish and disturbing. When his body is cremated, the ashes emanating from the crematorium spiral into the sky and then descend into a pond located in the center of town. Driven mad by the death of her husband, Shiuchi's mother attempts to remove all the spirals off her body - which leads to volume one's most unnerving vertiginous conceit (without giving any plot away, let's just note that it revolves around the woman's last days in hospital).

After Ito has established his basic premise through Shuichi's family, the story loses some of its straightforward momentum. We get individual chapters focusing on other townspeople - a schoolgirl with a tiny scar on her forehead, two young lovers caught in a Montague/Capulet conflict in the town's poverty-struck row houses, a second schoolgirl with a burning desire to be noticed - plus an effectively ghostly chapter involving Kirie's father and his kiln. By volume two, the physical transformation motif becomes even stronger, as some of the slower townsfolk start to transform into snails - an idea that owes as much to Ionesco than it does Weird Tales until the third volume when some of the other townspeople start to eat these once-human snails, again yanking an absurd conceit into the realm of horror. Some nicely horrific chapters set in the town's hospital (where Kirie winds up after a near fatal adventure in a lighthouse) comprise the largest part of the middle book. By the final volume, the entire town is ravaged by this all-consuming geometry: repeatedly assaulted by hurricanes and sudden whirlwinds, its own roads twisted into paths that turn in on themselves.

In short, we've entered H.P. Lovecraft territory - the land of horrifying mathematics and eldritch forces imposing themselves on modern unfortunates. Even some of Uzumaki's minor ideas take a page from old Howard Phillips: the row housing which assumes a major role in the series' final chapters, for instance, recalls Lovecraft's obsessive fear of poverty's trappings (without the racist underpinnings). When we're taken to the source of Kurozc-cho's demolition - an ancient city hidden beneath the town - we can't help thinking of the New England writer's Elder Gods.

Ito's art is rendered in a detailed style that is exceedingly friendly to Western readers: only occasionally does he appear to utilize tricks that look odd to manga newcomers. In one chapter, for instance, Shiuchi is shown thoughtfully examining his friend Kirie - an act that is pointlessly emphasized by the words "glance glance" placed in the space between the two characters. But more often, the artist's tight control of doom-laden atmosphere pleasantly reminds me of American horror artists like Reed Crandall in his Warren period, with a nod to Edvard Munch tossed in for good measure. There's even a winking allusion to "The Scream" placed in the background of one panel. But unlike Hollywood's jokey attempts at decontextualizing that image, Ito recalls Munch's late-night angst and recurrent themes of body loathing. Somehow I suspect that the Norwegian artist'd really identify with the hospital chapters, with their devouring women and infants.