Hone ga Kusaru made
Until Your Bones Rot

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If there's one thing you need to know about me, it's that I can't do horror. It doesn't matter if it's a movie, TV series, anime, or manga, I just can't do it. Why, do you ask? It's simple: I like sleeping well at night. While I might not like horror, I very much enjoy thriller/suspense stories, one of my favorites being The Hiding Place movies, Jurassic Park, and Gravity. When it comes to manga, I enjoy thriller stories even more. There's just something about the paneling that makes thriller manga so easy to binge read. That is especially true for Hone ga Kusaru made, ... or in englishh: Until Your Bones Rot. I kid you not I went to bed after reading the first 13 chapters, woke up the next day, went to church, came home, sat down, and BINGED the rest of the series. It takes a lot for a series to be so compelling that you physically cannot stop making yourself read. From chapter 3 and onwards, your hand will just make you keep scrolling. The murder, the mysterious phone person, the twists, the plots, subplots, counterplots, and plot-plots are all near perfect to me. I'm keeping this review spoiler free because this series is WAAAAAAY too good to spoil. There is a slight trigger warning. If you are sensitive to topics such as ped0ph1lia, r8pe, and Schmexual Assault, don't read this. I understand that not every manga is for everybody, so I just wanna put that out there. However, if you have a strong enough stomach, and love some mystery thriller stories, Hone ga Kusaru made is the manga for you. It have very short chapters that range from 10-16 pages, so you can get through it easily. These are my ratings of the individual aspects of the manga:

Story: 7/10 Seen this story done before in other manga, so nothing really out of the ordinary there
Characters: 10/10 The characters can make or break a story, but here, they utilized all of the characters, even if they seem insignificant. Also has great development of the main group
Art: 9/10 The art in this series comes across as pretty standard, but the more you read, the more you realize that the art adds to the atmosphere of dread.
Ending: 9/10 I was worried that I would hate the ending, but I love me a good redemptive ending

Overall: 9/10

good read. the characters are mostly great, love how their morals are tested throughout the story, and the fact the mc is also morally corrupt unlike your stereotypical goody-two-shoes mc.
it had so much potential, but i think it fell flat in many areas.
the detective, although a great character, i feel was underutilized in the story. maybe if the manga was longer he would have had a bigger role in the characters' conflict.
my biggest gripe is how one character isnt given enough justice in the end, a revelation that should fill the atmosphere with much more emotion, anger, and despair is instead replaced with empathy and ... a little bit of anger.
what one character did was a bigger deal than it was taken by the others, this character didn't just watch, it was cruel. it should've been a bigger wedge in their test of friendship.
but i digress, i still love how the mystery eventually unravels.

tl;dr: A manga with an okay mystery but with an awful and badly written cast and muddled themes.

This manga involves a group of five friends who committed premediated murder as children and buried the body. Since then, with both their guilt and the threat of being caught hanging equally over all of them, they have remained close friends. However, five years after the murder, the skeleton mysteriously disappears, and they receive a call from an unknown party threating to expose them if they don’t do what he asks. This results in them being put through the ringer of having to commit further crimes which they ... then need to hide from the police, while also doing their best to seek out and discover who the mysterious blackmailer is so that they can deal with him and go back to their normal lives.

There’s only essentially one mystery, though as the manga progresses it does get more complicated. It’s a decent mystery though not a great one. It relies on a lot of really convenient things happening or not happening in order for it to play out the way it does and the leaps in logic are a bit wild at times. At the same time, it’s paced well and keeps up the suspense by constantly throwing in new twists and leaving strong hints that make it feel like something bigger is coming. That combined with the paneling also being oriented towards flowing fast results in a manga that is a page turner and very easy to read through in a single sitting.

However, what felt more important than the mystery itself was the emphasis on the bonds between the group of friends. They’re put through a wringer which severely tests their bonds, but ultimately their bonds remain intact. However, that felt completely undeserved. The manga doesn’t do all that good of a job of showing the strength of their bonds. On the other hand, it does a great job of throwing a constant stream of events at them that should weaken and break said bonds. It spent more time on the bizarre toxic love polygon than it did on their friendship. There’s a lot of stuff that’s immensely unpleasant there and honestly it made me feel worse than any of the stuff directly related to the murders. That after everything went down, they were still close to each other felt incredibly unnatural, which made the ending overall feel somewhat bizarre.

A core theme of the manga is also that murdering people is obviously wrong. However, it does a really bad job of conveying that. It shows the characters struggling with their guilt and feeling pain in different ways. However, it does a terrible job at fleshing out characters and it felt like there were a lot of inconsistencies in motivations and such. The epitome of this comes from how two characters are straight up psychopathic for most of the manga, but suddenly have a change of heart at the end that wasn’t built up to at all. There’s no real character arc, it just happens. In the end it felt like the emotional beats it was going for just didn’t land.

The art was solid enough but not good enough for this to be a manga you’d read for the art. It conveys the story well and does a good job with the fast pacing but is never really all that nice to look at, nor are the gory and violent portions all that horrific.