Museum of Terror Books in Order

Imagine walking through a gallery where every exhibit is designed to unsettle you. That is the essential concept behind Museum of Terror. This collection serves as a retrospective archive, a curated tour through the formative years of Junji Ito. It gathers the ink-stained nightmares that helped build his reputation long before he became a global horror icon.

For fans reading in English, this series occupies a unique spot in publishing history. While the original Japanese run spanned ten volumes—aiming to be the definitive library of his output from 1987 to 2000—the English release was much more limited. Dark Horse Comics published only the first three volumes in the mid-2000s. As a result, these specific paperbacks have become something of a collector’s item, offering a glimpse into how Western audiences first encountered Ito’s work before the current wave of deluxe hardcovers took over the shelves.

The undisputed centerpiece of this collection is Tomie.

Spanning the first two volumes, this saga introduces readers to Ito’s very first creation, a character that launched his career. Tomie Kawakami is a high school girl with a terrifying allure that drives men into violent, homicidal frenzies. She is beautiful, petty, and inextricably tied to a cycle of destruction. What makes her nightmare so potent isn't just that she dies, but that she refuses to stay dead.

No matter how completely she is destroyed—dismembered, buried, or burned—she regenerates. Each piece of her flesh grows into a new, fully formed Tomie, continuing the obsession forever. Reading these volumes feels like watching an artist evolve in real-time; the artwork shifts from the rough, unpolished sketches of the late 1980s into the precise, clinical style that Ito is famous for today.

The third volume functions differently, acting as a grab bag of shorter shocks.

Often subtitled The Long Hair in the Attic, this installment moves away from long-form storytelling to showcase Ito’s talent for the short story format. It features tales that range from the tragic to the absurd. You might encounter a woman whose hair develops a mind of its own to exact revenge, or witness the visceral, sticky terror found in "Flesh-Colored Horror."

These shorts highlight Ito's ability to take a random, intrusive thought and stretch it until it snaps into something truly unhinged. While many of these stories have since been repackaged in newer anthologies like Deserter, Museum of Terror remains a fascinating time capsule. It captures the raw, unfiltered creativity of an artist figuring out exactly how to make our skin crawl, mixing the beautiful with the grotesque in a way that only he can.