Unsettling, eerie, and yet, extremely beautiful, Destronaut tells the story of an elderly samurai sent to the moon to recover a governmental disk from a wrecked space station. Once there, he is settled upon the corpses of year-old cosmonauts, possessed by some sort of biological component not known to Earth's organic structure, and must fight to complete his mission. The author knows very well how to portray a sense of foreboding emptiness that mirrors the cold, black, endless cosmos that surrounds their protagonist, which reflects in not only the creepy, empty geography of the moon but also the hollow, lifeless views of the possessed cosmonauts, as well as their empty space station, half covered in some sort of biological material that's overgrown it.
The story, while quite simple and short, does not need to be much more complicated than how simple it is - especially for a one-shot. It gets the point across and leaves the reader interested, satisfied, and eager to read until the end - even its small plot twist at the end. Destronaut would make a fantastic anime movie or OVA. If it could be really fleshed out, maybe a short tankobon set, or an anime series. However, dealing with the story alone, I think the more fleshed out it is, the blander it will be. Some works are better as short stories, otherwise, they lose their sense of creepiness, horror, or mystery. And for that, I give it major props. The only downside I would have is that the characters are fairly bland, but I can see from a stylistic point of view as to why that is. For one, it's a one-shot - the big idea is not the characters to begin with, and for something around thirty pages, there's not much time to flesh out characters. Two, the story isn't about characters, really, but more of an expression of atmosphere, art, and mystery.
As a one-shot, I think Destronaut did very well. It's short, creepy, has an absolutely beautiful artistic feel, and the voidness of space as well as the "creatures" in the work, mixed in with beautiful action make it absolutely worth the read. And, as this work reminds me a lot of the author himself, the quote from H.P. Lovecraft fits the style of Destonaut perfectly, and why you should definitely go and read it too:
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."
-H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature
