This is a collection of short horror stories by both American and Japanese authors. I really liked the collection as a whole. It also has two covers and you can read it starting with the American stories or the Japanese stories and they meet in the middle because they're read in opposite directions anyways (left to right or right to left).

1. Never Left by Michael W. Conrad and Becky Cloonan - This was a really strong start to the collection (if you start on the American side like I did). I loved the way the ending was left ambiguous. It involves a body in the ice and dopplegangers. It felt very reminiscent of The Thing movies.

2. Kamei by Ryo Hanada - This was another good one. I do like stories with yokai and this had a kappa which I think is always pretty fun. A boy is dying in a river and meets a kappa whose soul has sort of mixed with that of a young girl who died in the water before him. I thought the ending was quite satisfying here as well. There is a scene where... an eye was eaten which I thought was the grossest moment in the collection but it didn't bother me too much.

3. Mirror, Mirror by Sloane Leong and Leslie Hung - This was the weakest of the collection for me. It's about a girl and a her "mirror" version. She gets trapped in a mirror while another her takes over her life basically. It was alright, but it felt a little bit too typical? It didn't do anything that really stood out to me anyways.

4. Film Ephemera by Aki Shimizu - I think that in a way this is the most bizarre story in the collection. A manga assistant can see ghosts and for some reason collects a bunch of posters from the movie Being John Malkovich and hangs them in his closet which I guess invites a scary ghost into his apartment? It was alright, but I didn't think it was as scary because I was just... kind of confused by the premise? It was still good though.

5. The Window by Shima Shinya - A man is moving out of his apartment which has a window that's famous because if you open it there's supposed to be a ghost girl that will keep moving closer to you while you look at it. Most of the story is just a discussion about this folktale. I thought it was pretty much fine.

6. Shadow by Huahua Zhu - A student is having nightmares and finds a cat which they start to take care of in secret... I liked this one more than I thought I would. Initially I was worried that something bad would happen to the cat and that made me nervous because I'm a big cat person and really wouldn't want to see any gore involving a cat. Nothing like that ended up happening. Overall it was pretty good. ( )

Thank you to Netgalley for the ARC!

I do love a horror anthology! Especially one that features so many talented artists and storytellers. There were of course a couple of standouts, the first story about the SPOILER: body in the ice, really caught my attention. ( )