Alley

About

1-Sentence Summary

Alley is a collection of the following short stories.

Alley:
A young man moves into a boarding home next to an alley in which shadows of murdered people come to life at night.

Descent:
A group of people go missing over night only to fall from the sky some time later.

The Ward:
After a car accident, two women are admitted to a small hospital in which a strange group of people act like a single organism.

The Inn:
A man is suddenly obsessed with the idea of digging a deep hole on his property to open a hot spring to and from hell.

Blessing:
Hayao's girlfriend insists on getting her father's permission to date, but the father declines every time, no matter how much time goes by, so Hayao takes matters into his own hands.

Smoker's Club:
A young boy is invited to try new cigarettes, made from tobacco plants that grow next to a cremation site, but something is off with the pitch-black cigarette smoke.

Mold:
After one year abroad, a young man returns to his house that he rented out to his former teacher only to find the house empty and covered in strange mold.

Town of no Roads:
Saiko is a young girl that feels like she gets peered at every night, until she can't take it anymore and tries to escape to her aunt's house, only to find the area around her aunt's house has no roads anymore, so masked people travel through other people's houses to get from one place to another.

Memory:
Rie is a beautiful woman who has no memories from the time she was 7 to 14 years old, except for a single memory in which she looks into a mirror where her face is completely bloated, pimpled and not beautiful at all.

Ice Cream Bus:
A single father with his son moves into a new apartment, where an ice cream bus stops by to take children a tour once a week.

Reflections

This is another good short story collection. My favourite stories are Alley, Mold and Town of no Roads. I especially like the escalation in Town of no Roads. It's a great and unsettling horror story about privacy and the lack thereof.
The stories I didn't like were The Ward and Ice Cream Bus as I feel they were just too bizarre to be taken seriously.