You know what I hate the most about horror series?

When there's an included warning basically spoiling the entire series. It's a horror series. If you aren't ready to see some messed up stuff or possibly get disturbed, then you probably shouldn't be reading it. The only thing worse is when somebody reviews a horror series and then before they start their review they ALSO do a warning which again spoils the entire

CONTENT WARNING!

#This series is extremely gory, and approaches some subjects that people may find uncomfortable. Such as self-harm, bullying, and suicide................... oh, and also murder.#

#A Classroom Bereft of Angels#

Tenshi ga Ita Kyoushitsu is a fully colored manga by SeNMU. The plot's real simple. A well respected and admired (more often obsessed over) girl in a class has died, and all of her classmates are performing their own little funeral service for her.

And things of course go horribly wrong as someone throws out the idea that their idol did not simply kill herself but instead was murdered by one of her fellow classmates.

Emotions are running high, and this is effectively the lit match needed to set off this powderkeg ready to erupt into over the top violence at any moment.

Honestly, it pretty much almost goes without saying that this isn't a very... good manga. But for a small little manga about a class of girls completely turning on each other and then turning to violence in grief over loss of their idol, this was honestly better than I expected. ~~Also, I genuinely didn't expect how far it was going to go with the gore.~~

While most of it was cutting and stabbing or just straight up beating someone to death with chairs or people plummeting to their deaths either voluntarily or not voluntarily, there was at least one instance of a girl throwing acid in another girl's face. Whenever I see a horror manga willing to break out some hydrofluoric acid, I'm happy.

Even the twists, while not at all unique or clever, weren’t offensive or just downright stupid. There was one I actually even liked quite a lot and it was the sort of twist that if not handled exactly right, could ruin the rest of the series…

Spoiler, click to viewclick to hide

The main character having been dead the entire manga worked really well. It works for this series not only because the main character's role is more that of a witness than an active component in the swirl of insanity going on throughout this series, but because of how many characters there are and how chaotic it is. By the time the number of characters got slimmed down, it was already cemented in my mind that the other characters never directly answer gray hair girl because they just ignore her.

But then of course it turns out oh, she's not one of the last girls surviving. She's been dead for years. And then I went back and reread through it and yeah, none of the other students directly interact with or speak to her the whole time.

Ultimately though, even while there’s some things I genuinely like about it, there’s really no dressing it up. It’s just another horror manga that reaches for the edge as much as it possibly can, and isn’t shy about throwing the buckets of blood around.

Even while I most certainly would not call it good, it was acceptable for what it was. I give it a 4 out of 10 and can easily recommend it as long as you’re the sort of person who’ll go “yeah this doesn’t look very good but maybe it’ll have gore.” when looking at a horror manga.