Story by Cho Ju-Hee, Art by Suh Yun-Young
UDON Entertainment, 200 pp.
Rating: 16+

Eun-Sae decides to get closer to the boy she likes by helping him organize the student-run school library. Much to her chagrin, Kyung-Do is more interested in the books than he is in her. But she does notice that he takes an unhealthy interest in a particularly… evil book. The book may be responsible for the library advisor’s suicide, and it may also be responsible for the death of Kyung-Do’s father and the suicide of a student, both of which took place years before. A coroner is determined to get to the bottom of the case, as are Kyung-Do and Eun-Sae. Is the book evil? Is the ghost of the girl who committed suicide haunting the library? Or is the book cursed from being in the Library of Alexandria when it fell two thousand years ago? And what is the Reading Club, the self-described keepers of old, mysterious, and “prohibited” books?

This was quite different from what I expected. There’s a few levels of story going on in this volume. There’s the Kyung-Do and Eun-Sae story, which is about Kyung-Do finding the book and Eun-Sae preventing him from reading it, lest he die like his father did. There’s the actual history of the book, as well as the Library of Alexandria, and possible past life incarnations for Kyung-Do and Eun-Sae (it’s possible that these are dreams Eun-Sae had after Kyung-Do told her about the library, though). Then there’s the coronor, Ji-Wan, who’s investigating the teacher’s suicide in order to solve the mystery of her friend’s death at the same school ten years before. There are some problems transitioning between the stories (I had to read several sections more than once before I understood what was going on), but all the kinks are the types of things that seem like they’ll be worked out as the series goes on. This was just an establishing volume, but I have to say I was thoroughly intrigued by everything that was going on.

Most of the volume was driven by the intricate plot rather than the characters. Because there are so many things going on here, there wasn’t a lot of time spent developing any one person. As I was writing this review, I realized that Eun-Sae, one of the main characters, wasn’t actually called by name until halfway through the volume. Similarly, the coroner wasn’t named until the second or third time she appeared. Again, though, I imagine this being more a problem with the setup of the story in this volume than something that will persist through future volumes.

The art is pretty stark and sparse. The character designs, while a little on the plain side, are different enough from one another that there are no problems telling the characters apart. There are also some rather exotic characters sprinkled throughout, including the members of the Reading Club and some of the characters featured in the Alexandria flashback. The artist is also really great at the disturbing bleeding-from-the-nose scenes, which seems to be what happens when people read the book. The ghost in the library is also just as creepy as anything Junji Ito could come up with, though that ghost only really gets to shine on one or two pages.

I was pretty impressed with this beginning. It was not without its problems, but it was well-written, and, again, everything seems like it will work itself out as the story settles into a groove. I’m very much looking forward to seeing how the different plot threads come together to explain everything that was going on here.

Volume one of Reading Club is available now.