Mania Grade: B

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Info:

• Art Rating: N/A
• Packaging Rating: B
• Text/Translation Rating: B+
• Age Rating: 17+
• Released By: TOKYOPOP
• MSRP: 12.99
• Pages: 232
• ISBN: 9781427811370
• Size: B6
• Orientation: Left to Right
• Series: GOTH (novel)

Goth: A Novel of Horror

Goth Novel
© TOKYOPOP

Goth is a great read for readers prepared for a little bit of brutality and a lot of mind games.

Creative Talent:
Writer/Artist: Otsuichi
Translation: Andrew Cunningham
Adaptation: Andrew Cunningham

What They Say:
"Someone had taken apart her body in the forest. Her eyes, tongue, ears, thumbs, organs - each was nailed to a tree. One tree had, from top to bottom: the left big toe, the upper lip, the nose, and the stomach. Another had other bits of her arranged like Christmas tree decorations. The murder was soon the talk of the nation..."

In this truly shocking tale of terror, two high school sociopaths become fixated on a local serial murderer. But rather than trying to prevent and solve the next murder, their obsession grows, taking them on a descent into a maniacal darkness in which the most nightmarish acts occur.

What We Say:
Packaging:

Tokyopop's packaging for Goth is fairly different from the handful of other light novels they've sent me for review.  To begin with, the paper size adds an inch or two on each side compared to a typical B6 form factor.  Combine this a smaller typeface and tighter line spacing than are used in a lot of light novels printed in North America -- particularly Tokyopop's own light novel line -- and you end up with a surprising amount of text packed down into 230 pages.  As a point of reference, Goth was re-released in Japan as two separate paperback novelettes in Japan.  (This North American release retains the text and chapter ordering of the original single-volume Japanese hardback release.)

The print quality is decent.  The text is sharp and fairly easy to read considering the font size.  The binding is on the flimsy side, enough so that my review copy has already taken quite a bit of "shelf" ware sitting in my (literal) review pile.

Tokyopop has included three short afterwords as extras totaling about ten pages.  The first, written by the book's English-language editor, explains its publication history in Japan.  Author Otsuichi prepared the remaining two afterwords for the Japanese paperback reissues of Goth; he describes his inspirations writing the novel as well as his surprise at winning the Honkaku Mystery Prize.

Text/Translation:

Andrew Cunningham's English adaptation gives the text an appropriately pulpy quality.  The script tends toward shorter and simpler sentences to give it a more natural, actually-narrated-by-a-high-schooler feel.  Thankfully, it very rarely reads choppily, like many works written in this style tend to do.  Readers should be prepared for Otsuichi to play around with ambiguous language for the sole purpose of messing with their heads, although I think the way he does it reads well.

Contents (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):

The Goth novel is made up of six loosely connected stories about grisly murder cases, where the common threads among them are the anonymous high-school aged narrator and his schoolmate Morino Yoru.  (Calling him a "narrator" is a misnomer, since he doesn't narrate the entire book, but it's the best name I can come up with.)  Even with these two common characters throughout the novel, it's a stretch to say that there's some kind of overarching storyline, apart from some small evolutions in the relationship between the narrator and Morino.  You could almost reorder the chapters in any order you wished and still have them make chronological sense.

The title notwithstanding, there isn't much "goth" about the killings themselves; in fact, the only significant "goth" thing about the whole novel is that Morino is heavily involved in goth subculture.  (Otsuichi admits as much in the first afterword, apologizing to anyone who got a wrong impression of the book from its title.)  The subtitle "A Novel of Horror" is a better way to describe the book all-around, seeing as the main ties between these cases -- not to mention the part that gets the narrator interested in them to begin with -- are the horrific ways that the killers interact with their victims.

Goth is the kind of book where going into much more than a basic outline of the plot spoils many of the surprises; so for the purposes of this review, I'll just give a quick summary of each chapter's premise.  The titular first chapter deals with a notebook that Morino finds at a coffee shop that describes several killings in grisly detail, encouraging Morino and the narrator to track down the corpses out of morbid curiosity. "Wrist-Cut" follows Shinohara, a chemistry teacher who has developed a childhood fascination with hands into a secret double life of collecting hands from his still-living victims.  This second chapter is particularly interesting in that it gives away the killer and his motive nearly from the start, focusing instead on the psychological tension between Shinohara and the narrator as the narrative thread alternates between the two characters.  The third chapter, "Dog", hands the narrator over again to third party as it details the history of a girl involved in a series of pet kidnappings with her dog.  Notably, this chapter is the only one that wasn't carried over to Goth's manga adaptation, for reasons that should be apparent at the end of the story.

"Twins/Memory" mixes things up by not really having a solvable case to begin with: the story delves into Morino Yoru's childhood with her deceased twin sister Yuu.  "Grave", like "Wrist-Cut" before it, hands the narrative over to the chapter's killer, who in this case compulsively buries schoolgirls alive.  Finally, the long-ish closing chapter "Voice" has to do with Morino's classmate Hiroko and the cassette tapes she's been receiving in the mail from his sister's killer.  Otsuichi is intentionally vague throughout this chapter about the roles some of the novel's recurring characters play in these events, though it's implied that the narrator is the one stalking Hiroko.

Comments:

Although this is nominally a standalone review of the Goth novel, it's pretty much inevitable that I compare it with its manga adaptation: besides the fact that they're two versions of the same story with a writer in common, both the Goth novel and the Goth manga are being released in North America by the same publisher at similar price points on nearly the same date (plus or minus a few weeks and a couple of bucks).  The short version is that the two versions of Goth represent very different takes on roughly the same basic material: where the novel is much more methodical about its analysis of the crimes and the killers' motives, the manga cuts out a lot of the procedural work so that it can skip quickly to the cases' resolutions.  In other words, readers who've already picked one version can safely get the other without too much redundancy.

The longer version is that, in its novel form, Goth takes its time to detail the characters' thought processes -- both from the point-of-view of the narrator and of the killers themselves -- in a meticulous and carefully plotted way.  I've had mixed responses to Otsuichi's clinical writing style in the past; this is one situation where it works to the novel's benefit.  The killings described here are horrific, as are the narrator's cold-blooded responses to them, but they're just plausible enough that I'm willing to buy into the "reality" that Otsuichi is creating here.  His style also adds some interesting variations on the typical whodunit formula, since it shifts the emphasis away from just keeping the killer's identity a secret.  This is especially apparent in the second chapter, where Otsuichi literally explains who the killer is within the first few pages; with that element of surprise gone, it's still an interesting read, since it gives the story space to focus instead on the tension between the killer and the narrator.

The only significant bone that I still have to pick with Otsuichi's writing style here is that he relies too much on twist endings to his stories: a good three out of the six chapters in Goth hinge so much on their surprise endings that I don't expect them to hold up if they're read a second time.  If you can overlook the book's questionable re-reading value, though, you should find the Goth novel to be a worthwhile one-time read and a superior companion to its sister manga.