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Junji Ito, master of the horror manga.
I had expectations for Uzumaki, having heard it was one of Junji Ito's better known work. But I was disappointed in this manga: Uzumaki is hardly scary or horrifying. Uzumaki is not, in my honest opinion, a horror manga. Let me tell you why.

It's all in the atmosphere. Or in this case, the complete lack of it. The story is just so ridiculously over the top! It breaks any kind of immersion. The best (and well known) example is: The Spiral is granting the mosquitoes the terrible power of... flying in spirals. Hypnotizing! I won't spoil it for you, but ... it gets better. As in hilariously stupid.

While the overall concept of a strange and unknown force messing up the world is refreshing (no big bad monster!), I could never get into it. Once the Spiral has taken hold of the city, it never stops tormenting it. And it goes way too far. Intentionally or not, this manga is parodying itself.

Each chapter can stand on its own, the manga being more of a collection of interconnected stories. And after reading a couple chapters, you start noticing a pattern... Ito's world follows a number of rules. For example:
1-Newly introduced character(s) will die at the end of present or next chapter.
Corollary:1.1- Fighting the Spiral is useless. Humans cannot escape or change their fates.
(And I'm not even spoiling anything. Just read a couple of chapters, you'll see! Discerning this pattern made the reading boring as hell too)

The minor character don't get a lot of exposition or characterization. One chapter isn't enough to get me to know and get attached to any character. It leaves them flat as cardboard, and half as interesting. They do serve a purpose, however: meatbags. It's sad really: potentially interesting characters reduced to meatbags. They exist so they can get killed. Quite gory deaths too. I didn't care about them though. And seeing a character you don't care about suffer or die won't trigger a strong emotional response. I mean, I didn't care for their deaths. Too bad for the horror I wanted. Ito got me a truckload of gore though.

Now, I've got to give credit where credit is due. The art is nice. Ito's got his own realistic-ish character drawing style, and he always show the mutilated dead people in great detail. He also tends to exaggerate his character's expressions when they get crazy, making them look inhuman. I find it ugly and silly, but it's a personal preference.

In the end, I found that only one chapter of the manga was interesting and memorable: the attention seeking-hair (it still is one of the first chapters, don't worry). This one is light on blood and gore, but was still delightfully creepy.

All in all, this manga was rather boring. Bland and forgettable characters lessen the impact of the gore. The ridiculous storyline gets out of hand pretty fast and I found myself laughing at the stupidity of it all in the later chapters. As I said, the art is really nice, but I find that Uzumaki lacks the most important part of a horror manga: the horror. It's got gore though.