I read Hoozuki no Shima a while ago, and I found that I enjoyed it quite a bit. I'm very into the horror genre as a whole, so it's not surprising I forgave it for its issues. Today I was browsing the manga list trying to find something to read, when I saw Hoozuki again. I decided to check out the author, Sanbe Kei, and it led me to this manga, known in English as "Cradle of Monsters".

Zombies in general have always been an iffy subject for me. They are hardly ever scary, and are instead used when the "horror" aspect refers to gore, which I don't feel is true horror. Luckily, the author made the right choice by not really making the monsters zombies. Instead, they are normal humans who get infected and slowly get consumed by bloodlust. They can still talk and act rationally, which led to some decently horrific scenes.

Unfortunately, there isn't much more good I can say about this manga. The characters were pretty standard for a horror survival situation, with a few exceptions. Those exceptions can't really make up for the rest of the cast as a whole, however.

The art was, in my opinion, passable. The gore was pretty detailed, but nothing else ever stood out to me much (except the fact that the women weren't sticks, which I enjoyed). Also, the story is supposed to take place in an upside down cruise ship, but the author messed up a lot of details with this, such as surveillance cameras on the ceiling, which means they were originally on the floor, and stairs going up, meaning that the ship had stairs on the ceiling. Those details weren't a major issue, but were jarringly distracting when I noticed them.

Even though I didn't have much good to say about this manga, in the end of the day I found it vastly enjoyable. The characters that were interesting kept me going, and for once in this kind of fiction I wasn't sure who was going to survive. This lead me to pursue the story to the end, and if I enjoyed it, I guess that's the whole point. I'd recommend this for horror or survival fans, but if you aren't usually into those genres it could easily be a hit or miss. I'm on to Sanbe Kei's next work!