A short one-shot manga with a Picasso-esque art-style - the first-person told story of a sociopathic child that becomes a teenage leader of a cult made up of young boys that worship him for his ability to inflict death on others.

This is a unique case - objectively, this is not particularly good or unique. As other reviews pointed out, the plot is very simplistic, being just a sort of poetic first-person narration of the titular Child of God as he traces his childhood misbehavior, sociopathy, lack of connection with the world and his later crimes as an adolescent, a cult-leader and a pederast, where he leads a cult of beautiful young boys which interact sexually with him.

The characterization is rather shallow - the Child himself says he has done away with "such useless things as emotions and personality", although he clearly has emotions, as he cries on two occasions, both because of a death (both of which he committed). The Child is pure evil from the moment he is born. It is subtly implied that the Child is an unreliable narrator: as I said, he clearly has emotions, but states he does not, he says he was born out of his mother's asshole and grew in her stomach rather than her womb. As there is nothing supernatural as either the Child or the story as a whole, this seems to fit better with the fact that the Child is highly narcissistic and, as we see, has an anal fixation.

Despite these signs that the Child might be an unreliable narrator, nothing ever comes of it - no attention is pulled to it, nor is it a theme in any sense of the word as it is in, say, American Psycho, where Bateman is clearly delusional and that drives most of the plot.

I think it would have benefited if the Child had created a special bond with one of his beautiful boys, and if that relationship took an (even more) horrific turn, for then it would have a special impact on us - seeing how far above the Child is above feelings that he may tear even those he is close to apart.

Overall if I was to judge this "objectively" (no such thing, of course - I simply mean "on its own merits" rather than how I feel about it), I would give it a 6/10, for a simple if effective story and shallow characterization backed up by some incredible and unique abstract artwork. But this story hits so many of my personal fixations, manias, obsessions, etc, that I became immediately obsessed with it, down to the Child himself and his beautiful, cold, androgynous appearance. Indeed it has a death grip around thoughts of mine that are so niche and unusual and perfectly portrays them in its unique style, that it veered straight into "how was I not the one to write this" territory.

So, yeah. 6/10 if you want a level-headed assessment of it, 8/10 for very personal reasons.

Recommended if you share a fixation with death, meaningless cruelty, male androgyny and all of those things combined lmao.