Cube? Great movie. Sphere? An underrated masterpiece. The Ring? Terrifying. The Blob? Even more so. And the scariest villain in Silent Hill was Pyramid Head.

Enter Uzumaki, a 1998 collection of stories about a town haunted (possessed, perhaps?) by spirals. Not spiral-shaped creatures, mind you - just the shape itself, or the concept of it. The plot revolves around teen Kirie and her boyfriend, Shuichi, who have the misfortune to live in this doomed town. Shuichi's father is obsessed with spirals - shells, coiled worms, the swirling water in his bathtub. He spends hours staring at his collection of spiral-shaped objects and is angry when his wife cooks non-spiral dumplings. Kirie is drawn into his orbit when he says he'll pay "any amount!" for a spiral bowl from her father, a potter. His obsession eventually inspires him to mutilate his own body.

Shuichi's mother, the second victim, has an equal and opposite descent into madness. Terrified after witnessing what the spirals "did" to her husband, she refuses to be in the same room as one - in hospital, she won't let a nurse with curled hair treat her, and panics when she sees that the tube for her intravenous drip has been left in a coil. When she notices that her fingerprints are basically spirals, she, like her husband, does something that will leave even hardened horror fans wincing, bringing things full circle. After that, things pretty quickly spiral out of control.

Early in my career I angered some of my readers by expressing a dislike for Blade Runner (all fifty versions of it). "Eyes" just didn't seem to me like much of a theme, no matter how many retina close-ups we got, no matter how many people's eyeballs were scanned or gouged out. "Spirals" is an even sillier motif to centre a story around, but it's the strangeness that makes it work. Fleeing from zombies or Godzilla is sensible. Fleeing from spirals is madness, and madness is what writer/artist Junji Ito is most interested in. Reading this book feels like losing your mind. I found I couldn't read it right before bed (that's about the biggest compliment you can give a horror story) because I wouldn't be able to sleep, my thoughts spinning around and around in tighter and tighter circles.

It's amazing just how much juice Ito can squeeze from such a thin premise. Whirlwinds! Corkscrews! Snake-sex! Even time itself! It's all spirals, man, and they're coming to get you.

It's a pity, then, that the characters are so flat. Kirie has little personality beyond "Shuichi's girlfriend", and it's unclear that they're even in a relationship until the final pages. Kirie's concern for her brother leaves the reader thinking, "Wait - she has a brother?" (She also suddenly has a pregnant cousin.) As for Shuichi, his only noticeable trait is that he's kind of a jerk, making Kirie bring lunch to him so he doesn't have to leave the house, and then berating her for being outdoors during a spiral-shaped hurricane.

Some of the stories also move a little too quickly, in a way that makes them simultaneously predictable and bizarre. "Funny how he only shows up at school when it's raining," says Kirie about a painfully slow-moving boy who is obviously going to turn into a snail. "He loved to jump out and surprise people. Everyone called him Jack-in-the-Box," she says about a different boy who is clearly going to end up bursting out of a coffin with a giant spring (spirals, man!) stuck in his backside.

The stories also end abruptly, with little explanation and even less fallout. When dozens of people are murdered (with spiral-shaped hand-drills, naturally) in the town hospital, I don't think anyone even calls the police. And the complete collection ends on a similarly morose note. I thought perhaps Kirie might bring another shape - a tetrahedron, perhaps? - to the very centre of the giant spiral that haunts the town, thus breaking the curse, the way a flaw in the foundations can bring down a building. The tetrahedron could have been on a pendant, given to her by Shuichi, giving the reader a hint that he cared about her, or felt anything at all. Wearing this pendant might even have explained her apparent immunity to the madness in the town.

I won't spoil the ending, but that's not what happens.

The stories may feel rushed because Ito spent most of his time on the art, which is truly extraordinary. The level of detail in each panel surpasses any other manga I've read. And the big reveals - Shuichi's father's twisted corpse, the tangled limbs of the people in the row house - are breathtaking. You might yelp out loud when turning the page, and then keep turning back to it, even after you've finished the book.

Or, you might not. Either way, you'll certainly never look at your zucchini spiraliser the same way again.

Jack Heath is the author of Hideout.