Domu is a short little horror manga by Katsuhiro Otomo from 1981. Katsuhiro Otomo is the original creator of Akira, ~~a series I've been meaning to get to for a long time~~. But Domu came before Akira and the two seem drastically different ~~going solely off of Akira's description~~.
The only version of this I could find online was probably a scan of the out of print English version, so it's left to right rather than right to left.
The plot of this manga basically centers around an apartment building that has begun to suffer mysterious events. People just seem to keep dying. While some of these deaths seem to be suicidal in nature, they just seem to keep happening.
In truth, it turns out that someone is actively causing these events. A twisted person yet who possesses a childlike mind and sees what they're doing as nothing but a game that simultaneously possesses supernatural powers is manipulating these people into killing themselves.
But everything changes when a little girl and her family moves there, and the little girl possesses supernatural powers as well and almost immediately notices this twisted person right as they're about to cause an infant to fall off a balcony, wishing to see it burst on impact like a tomato.
From this moment on, Domu just turns into an all-out war between these two psychics. It is incredibly gory, it is incredibly dark, and it works as a horror in the sense that this horrible person with these supernatural powers is being genuinely terrifying to the people who he forces to push themselves into meeting grisly and usually violent ends.
Admittedly, there are points in the manga where to me it was kind of difficult to discern exactly what was happening given that the battle that's being waged is via supernatural mind powers, but once it really started rolling into complete and utter chaos, I was really, really engaged.
Additionally, I can always appreciate it when in a story like this, truly utterly nobody is safe from the carnage. ~~I mean I guess the aforementioned baby was saved if you want to be technical, but I'm okay with that.~~ Because when the antagonist takes over the mind of the drunk character and sends him off on his way armed with a cop's gun, he is basically gunning down whoever gets in his way as he stumbles on towards his true target.
So if you're in the mood for something dark, something horrifically violent, or just a supernatural psychic war sort of thing, Domu's pretty good! Plus, it's like only six chapters long. Short, and quick to the ~~horrific violence~~ point. I give it a 9 out of 10. Because apparently I'm messed up in how much I enjoy horrific violence.
