Genre: Contemporary Fantasy
Year Release in English: 2017
Source: Physical Copy

Content warnings: Body horror, blood, animal violence against children, threats of violence

Araragi figured how to get rid of a crab that takes on people’s burdens and uncovered the truth behind the strange young girl with an enormous backpack. But one of Senjogahara’s friends and one of his sisters’ classmates both have aberrations attached to them, and he sees no other option that roping in Senjogahara and Hanekawa into helping him out with it.

This volume does a lot more digging into the world of aberrations and their relationship to what everyday people see, with plenty of deliberate wordplay and theming.

Genre: Contemporary Fantasy
Year Release in English: 2016
Source: Physical Copy

Content warnings: Mention of an attempted rape, death of a child, cults, injuries, blood, threats of violence

This light novel series starts off with a fairly simple premise: a former vampire catches his classmate who slipped on a banana peel, only to find that she weighs literally nothing. And if full of stationery. And haunted by a crab. In the second half of the book, the two of them encounter a little girl haunted by a snail aberration, but there’s more to it than meets the eye.

Full of friendship, interesting exchanges, strange happenings, and explorations of past trauma that don’t get resolved with the resolution of the haunting, there is so much to like and see in this work told almost entirely through dialogue but does not at all feel like reading a script.