When you see the horror tag on a manga's overview page, you usually expect the story to be scary, right? Well, not with Hiki, the scariest thing you can get here is 5 chapters of a somewhat entertaining mess. From actual potential to be an amazing read and a sleepless night, to a realization that you could just read Junji Ito instead of this. I'm a sucker for dark side of Japan's countryside, characters being in an small isolated enviroment, story set that feeling from beginning with a key mystery starting in first chapter which I can admit was intriguing and had massive potential. However, everysingle chapter managed to be worse than the previous one, all the way to the mess of a conclusion. The story itself wasn't scary like... at all, the only thing that made me feel something was a few panels by the way the mangaka drew them. After checking her page to see other titles she worked on, I wasn't surprised one bit when I saw mostly BL and no horror, as it felt like she wanted to make this story BL as well.

All characters besides the protagonist felt one-dimensional, some of them were in the story for just one chapter, and yet felt like their story should have been much longer (stalker girl who served literally no purpose except to show up half a chapter). Even the characters who were there the whole story had a personality on paper, but not in practice. The protagonist was the only one who felt like an effort was actually put in while writing him, but even he wasn't anything spectacular. Dynamics as well were basically non-existent, besides the protagonist and his best friend, who seemed like they were fighting the strongest urge not to kiss each other the entire time.

Art was alright, had that shoujo aesthetic which I can always appreciate. Like I said before, horror panels were actually pretty nicely drawn, and some of them really gave off the unsettling vibe. I definitely feel like mangaka would be good at drawing the horror manga (without writing the story for it).

Overall wasted potential, if you wanna kill some time and really have nothing better to do, then sure give it a read, otherwise there are much better horror titles out there that deserve more of your attention than Hiki.