One of the few drawbacks of this series was that there was very little character developement. But, truth be told, I was so engrossed in the story itself that I actually could have cared less if there WAS any character development at all.
The plot is so simple that it’s scary, literally. I mean, in the beginning I thought "Wow. All this crap is going on and the people in the village aren’t even freaking alarmed! How?" But then I later realized that the spiral had already started to push the villagers towards the brink of insanity from the very beginning, so even they're passive attitudes could be directly linked to the spiral. I guess that's what creeped me out the most.
The snail people were just downright depressing. And the “face-biting” comment that one of the characters made in the third volume was just plain disturbing, but I still loved it.
Admittedly, the third volume was a bit of a disappointment and quite honestly, it seems as thought author just got side tracked or became distracted with other things. The ending was pretty weak, too sigh. It put just a bit of a damper on the overall appeal of the series, but not enough to make me dislike it as a whole. It was still awesome.
“Uzumaki” is a very obscure series. In some ways, it’s blatantly scary; psychologically...it's definitely on point. This type of series usually isn't my thing, but I can't deny the fact that this is really good stuff. Junji Ito is an awesome artist and this series is most definitely one of his best. Scared the living hell out of me, too-- which is really hard to do, usually.
Were it not for the two slip-ups in the third volume, this series would receive a 10/10 easily.