Is Hellstar Remina Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

An astronomer discovers a new planet hurtling through space and names it after his teenage daughter, Remina. It's a nice gesture right up until the planet turns out to be devouring stars whole and is on a direct collision course with Earth. Junji Ito's Hellstar Remina starts as a first-contact-style disaster premise and pivots fast into something much uglier: once the public realizes the threat is coming, they start treating the actual teenage girl who shares the planet's name as if she's the one responsible for it.

What it does well

The central idea is strong enough to carry the whole book on its own — a planet that eats stars and is now eating its way toward us is a genuinely great cosmic-horror hook, and Ito draws it with the same uncanny, wrong-angle dread he usually saves for faces and bodies. But the smarter move is what the story does with the premise: the real horror isn't the planet, it's what a frightened public does once panic sets in. Remina becomes a scapegoat almost instantly, and watching that spiral — rumor, blame, mob behavior — turn an innocent kid into a target says more about human nature under pressure than most horror stories manage with ten times the page count.

Being a single volume works entirely in its favor. There's no padding, no arc that overstays its welcome — just a steady, relentless climb from discovery to global panic to the story's conclusion. If you want a complete Junji Ito horror story you can read start to finish in one sitting, this is about as efficient as his bibliography gets, and the scale of the threat gives the art room to go properly huge without losing the sense of dread that makes his smaller-scale body horror work too.

Where it falls short

Don't expect deep characterization — this is a disaster story moving at speed, and everyone outside Remina herself exists mostly to serve the plot's escalation. If you came looking for Ito's signature grotesque body-horror imagery (the stuff Uzumaki or Tomie built their reputations on), this is a different register of horror; the scares here come from scale and crowd behavior, not transformation and decay. The ending is also bleak and fast in a way that reads as thematically correct to some readers and abrupt to others — it doesn't slow down to give you a conventional sense of closure.

Verdict

Hellstar Remina is Junji Ito doing disaster horror instead of body horror, and the social commentary about mob scapegoating is sharper than the premise alone would suggest. It's short, it's focused, and it doesn't waste a page. If you want a complete Ito story with real bite beyond just unsettling imagery, this is one of his best standalone volumes — just go in knowing it's a different kind of horror than his most famous work.