Why not, I’m way behind on my Cannonballs and trying to read to relax more anyways, so why not just work through my favorite Junji Ito stories? Gyo follows thee classic Ito pattern of “take thing, make scary.” In this case, he gives us… fish with legs.
That sounds stupid and silly, and it is certainly something you can laugh at in places. If you’ve ever seen the meme of what sounds a shark makes when it breaks down a door (gashunk) this is where that comes from. But then it turns out they’re fast, their legs are sharp, and they have no problem running roughshod over people and tearing them to pieces. Also there are tons of them. Also they fly sometimes. Also the machines that make them walk can attach to humans and harvest your bodily gases (literally farts) and turn you into an automaton yourself. Also the gas becomes conscious and malicious when there’s enough of it.
Yes all that is real, and no actually it’s not that much of a spoiler because there is no way you would actually anticipate where all this goes and how. This is deeply imaginative work, the art is incredible, if disgusting, and this is an excellent primer to Ito’s work. This is actually the first of his work that I read, getting it from the Seattle Public Library knowing very little apart from a collection of Ito pictures I’d seen once, each more shocking than the last. It’s fun to look back on that now: at the time, only Tomie, Uzumaki, and Gyo were translated to English and available to me. Now, I have nearly two dozen Ito titles on my shelf with beautiful art on each spine, and looking at that shelf just makes me so happy.
Gyo is very graphic and uncompromising, so go in warned of that. But it’s a unique, zany and very scary story. Definite Recommend.