Is Abara Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

A city sits atop ancient, half-buried tombs, and something fast, nearly invisible, and extremely dangerous starts hunting through its streets. Tsutomu Nihei's Abara follows a small cast caught up in that threat, but plot summary undersells what the manga is actually about — this is a mood piece built on dread, scale, and some of the densest, most distinctive linework in the medium.

What it does well

Nihei's art is the reason to read this, full stop. His cross-hatching and sense of towering, oppressive architecture create a genuinely unique visual language, and the creature design — fast, barely glimpsed, wrong in a way that's hard to pin down — is the kind of horror image that sticks with you well after you put the book down. The atmosphere doesn't let up from the opening pages; there's a constant low hum of dread running through the whole thing, helped by the sense that this city and its buried history are as much a threat as the creature itself.

Being short works in the story's favor. Abara doesn't ask for a long-term commitment — you get a complete, self-contained horror mood piece in one sitting, which is refreshing if you're used to sprawling multi-volume series. The English Complete Deluxe Edition also throws in "Digimortal," an earlier Nihei short story, which is a nice bonus look at where his style was coming from before this particular world.

Where it falls short

Nihei is simply not interested in walking you through what's happening, and that's worth knowing going in. Plot mechanics and character motivation stay vague by design — if you need clear exposition to feel oriented in a story, Abara will frustrate you more than it unsettles you. The same density that makes the art so striking can also make individual panels genuinely hard to parse, especially during the faster action sequences, where it's not always obvious what you're looking at on a first pass. And character work is minimal across the board; this is a story about mood and spectacle first, with people as almost secondary figures moving through it.

Verdict

Abara is a short, visually extraordinary piece of sci-fi horror that trusts atmosphere over explanation, and if that's the kind of read you're after, it delivers something genuinely distinct. If you need a story that clearly tells you what's going on and why, this isn't the place to start with Nihei — but if you want to see what his density and scale can do in a compact package, it's a strong, quick read.