EROMANGA
HALL OF FAME

The plots that panic-horror cinema has long relied on can be carried over into adult manga. Parasite Queen earns its place in the hall through the skill of that translation.

The book gathers three novellas of assault fiction built around non-human creatures: a parasite, orcs and zombies. The title story is a panic tale in which a parasite escapes a research laboratory by accident and spreads through a present-day school. The other two follow a revolt by orcs held captive as a source of transplant organs, and a special-forces unit that runs into a zombie outbreak.

What joins the three is a single pattern: something humans have looked down on and put to use slips out of their control and turns on them. Reviewers credit the book with laying this familiar science-fiction and horror device over the fantasy conventions of princess knights and orcs, and with going so far as to ask, from the orcs' side, what it means to harvest organs. Readers agree on the care given to the settings and on plots that twist more than once, and several single out the zombie story's use of eye colour to tell those who still keep their reason from those already infected.

This is Fan no Hitori's second book, published by Kill Time Communication two years after the debut collection Dropout.

The print edition came out at the end of October 2016 and the digital one that December, going straight to first place on DLsite's daily and weekly charts. It entered through the sales gate and stands 172nd among the hall's commercial works.