Stitches is nine short horror stories in one book. Some of the stories were okay, but for the most part, they were kind of boring. I hate to say that as two of my favorite things to read are horror and graphic novels, but it fell short. I am not sure if they were translated into English and the writing was just lost in translation. I wanted to like this, but the stories lacked horror for the most part. I had to go back and see if this was written for children. It was basically on par to be the Japanese version of "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark." I want to have something positive about this small anthology of short stories, so I will at least say I had never heard the stories that were written. It did have that "weird" Ito-style too, which I appreciated.

(Not really Kihara's fault, but the ARC from the publishers, but it was really annoying to have the watermark in the middle of the pages where it covered or completely erased words. That and it was not read in manga format-I am not sure if the published copy will be, but I hope so). I am not familiar with Kihara's work, but it seemed like Junji Ito might have done the illustrations and used his name so people will try Kihara out. I thought there would be more Ito, but it was just an illustration or two in each story.

This is actually a collection of short (micro?) stories, each lasting only a few pages. As with most short story collections, there were hits and misses but it was very interesting to see Junji Ito's artwork throughout the book.