Is Another Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

Another is the manga version of Yukito Ayatsuji's horror novel, with art by Hiro Kiyohara. Koichi Sakakibara transfers into Class 3-3 at a small-town middle school and immediately senses something is off. His classmates are tense and evasive, and one girl with an eyepatch, Mei Misaki, seems to be treated like she isn't there at all. The reason is a curse: years ago the class started a quiet habit of pretending a dead student was still alive, and ever since, Class 3-3 has been marked. Some years, an 'extra' person is in the room — someone who should be dead — and when that happens, students and their families begin to die, one after another.

The hook is figuring out the rules before the body count climbs too high.

What it does well

The setup is a near-perfect horror machine. You have a clear, cruel logic — a death curse with rules that can maybe be broken — and a cast that's terrified of talking about it. That tension does a lot of work. Even in quiet scenes, you're aware that something is wrong with this room, and the manga keeps you off balance about who can be trusted.

Kiyohara's art is the standout. It's restrained and cold, heavy on still, silent panels that let dread build instead of jump-scaring you. The town feels grey and hushed, and the character designs are memorable, Mei especially. It's the kind of horror art that gets under your skin slowly.

And the mystery genuinely works as a mystery. The story is really about deduction: which classmate is the dead one, how the curse functions, what the survivors from past years know. The clues are placed fairly enough that you can theorize, and the drive to understand the system pulls you through to the end.

Where it falls short

The deaths are the sticking point. As the curse ramps up, the kills get more elaborate and gruesome in a Final Destination sort of way, and a couple of them cross the line from scary into almost comic. How much that bothers you will decide a lot about your experience.

Because it's a compact adaptation, the supporting cast also suffers. Several classmates barely register as people before the curse gets to them, which blunts the impact of some deaths. And the final reveal is famously divisive — it's the kind of twist that some readers find clever and others find deflating.

Verdict

Another is a strong, atmospheric horror-mystery that's a little let down by its own escalation. If you read it for the creeping dread and the puzzle of the curse, it delivers, and the art alone is worth the time. Just know going in that the deaths get silly before the answers arrive, and that the ending is the kind people argue about. As a complete, one-omnibus read, it's an easy pick for a horror night.