By Mizuki Mizushiro and Namanie. Released in Japan by Enterbrain. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Nicole Wilder.

The good news is that this is a much more tonally consistent book than the first two, and has a better idea – most of the time – as to when to be over the top funny and when to have the reader genuinely disturbed. Renko remains the best character, getting in so many hilarious lines I can’t even bother to count them but also getting a really surprising amount of character depth (though I could have done without the epilogue telling rather than showing us all that character depth). Eiri continues to be the girl that Kyousuke SHOULD end up with, and I am very happy to hear that she’s the focus of the next book. Maina was less annoying as well this time around, and though Shamaya is back she seems to have lost the unpleasant implications of the end of the last book and just become another garden variety psycho. What I’m trying to say here is that I enjoyed everything about this except for the two lead characters and the main plot.

I knew going in that I wasn’t going to warm up to Ayaka. The “little sister obsessed with her big brother to an unnerving degree” is something already greatly exaggerated and overused by anime in general, and so turning the dial to 11 is not as successful as I think the author wants it to be. We’re meant to be amused at first and then gradually horrified as we realize that Ayaka is far more mentally unbalanced than she really should be for a “comedy” light novel, but since she enters the book hitting the high note and then only gets higher after that, we’re merely exhausted. That said, the larger issue here is Kyousuke.

There are hints, particularly at the end of the book, that Kyousuke’s entire family is, shall we say, a bit unusual, but even so, his reactions to Ayaka’s behavior beggar belief. I could be wrong here by dint of being an only child, but I’m fairly certain even the most doting brother would have noticed what was going on with Ayaka long before he did. It’s one of those cases where the revelation can’t come until the climax of the book, and so the hero ends up being unnecessarily stupid. The plot – when it arrived – was actually quite interesting, involving Ayaka deliberately being recruited into the school by their teacher, who can see a future assassin in her no doubt, but the fact that we didn’t find out about that until 90% of the way through the book is frustrating. And the subplot – involving everyone studying for finals, which have awful punishments for the bad students and setups for the next volume for the good students – was simply dropped at the end, making the “Fatal Final” a giant anticlimax.

And so, having spent much of this review being annoyed, let’s return to my original paragraph. This is a better book than the first two. The writing is more consistent, and there were some nice heartfelt scenes almost despite itself. But I don’t think Psycome will ever stop teetering on the edge of being a flaming ball of disaster, as seen in the Kamiya Family this time around. As long as it teeters and doesn’t fall off, I’ll keep reading.

By Mizuki Mizushiro and Namanie. Released in Japan by Enterbrain. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Nicole Wilder.

The second volume of Psycome takes its premise and runs with it, as we see our class of murderers sent on a field trip/survival camp, a trope that I thought was actually more Western than anything else but apparently must pop up in Japan as well. Once at camp, we get the usual combination of cliched romantic comedy antics and attempted killings, even though, of course, murder is absolutely prohibited by the staff. We see such cliches as walking across a rickety rope bridge, class skits around the campfire, late-night ero comedy at the hot springs, and a nature walk to boot. And all this is supervised by a new girl, Shamaya, the Murder Princess of the title. And unlike Kyousuke or Eiri, she is definitely here for genuine murder, as she sees fit to gleefully tell us.

Just as all the main cast are painful cliches, so is Shamaya – as you can tell from the cover art, she’s the pampered ojou-sama type, and also fills in as head of the Public Morals Committee, dedicated to making sure all the new freshman are following the straight and true path. Of course, after Book One we know that said path is turning teenage killers into professional assassins, so we’re not too impressed. And indeed Shamaya is fairly easily thrown off her game – at first by people merely breaking the rules (such as the three goons whose names I can’t even remember trying to strangle Kyousuke), but later on she meets her match in Maina, the baby-talking clumsy girl who’s in this school for accidental deaths so ludicrous that no one believes they’re accidental. Maina brings out Shamaya’s true psychotic nature, but unfortunately for her there’s already a better psycho in town, Renko.

The book continues to walk a fine line, and doesn’t always succeed – sometimes when it tries too hard to be earnest or serious, I don’t feel as if it’s earned it. Hence I was skeptical of Shamaya’s heel-face turn after Maina’s big speech, and kept waiting for it to be another trick. Some of the comedy also falls flat, such as the epilogue where Shamaya seems to have traded in her murderous impulses for yuri impulses. But this is offset by some genuinely good set pieces, such as Eiri’s apology to Kyousuke for being such a tsundere to him, which *does* seem genuine and earned, or Maina’s aforementioned speech, which is depressing but also uplifting. And some of the comedy managed to surprise me and make me laugh, particularly Renko’s beatboxing rap group, which has to be read to be believed.

So, as with the first volume, we’re left with a promising yet deeply inconsistent book with an intriguing premise. The epilogue promises us a new character in the third volume, which I suspect will ramp up another cliched harem comedy trope accordingly, much as I’d wish it wouldn’t. But that’s what you get when you read a series like this. If they’re going to set a series in a wacky prison school and then throw in every cliche in the book, it would feel wrong not to hit every cliche. I’m not sure I could tolerate a manga or anime of this, but as prose, Psycome is amusing, goofy fun.

By Mizuki Mizushiro and Namanie. Released in Japan by Enterbrain. Released in North America by Yen On.

Achieving the balance between supposedly new and exciting things and using the popular cliches that everyone knows will sell well can be quite difficult. Once you get the basic premise out of the way, you can feel free to roll out the typical gags and characters. The teacher who’s in her mid-20s but looks about 10 years old; the clumsy crying girl; the classic tsundere (combine with the cool beauty for extra points!), and the eccentric ditz. Throw in a hero who manages to rise above the typical harem lead sightly, but still let him crash into large breasts on a regular basis and have a sister with an unhealthy obsession with him. All this can be added, and is fine – but only if you get the premise that draws people in. With Psycome, the author seems to have found their premise, as all this takes place in a school/prison devoted to “rehabilitating” murderers. Which most of the above ‘types’ actually are.

Psycome is short for “Psycho Love Comedy”, and they ain’t kidding. Our hero is Kyousuke, who grew to be strong to protect his little sister from being bullied. A bit too strong, in fact, as one day said bullies are all found dead in a warehouse, leading him to be the obvious suspect. He’s sent to the aforementioned prison, where he meets his classmates, also composed of murderers and psychopaths, and their teacher with a hair-trigger temper and no school rules to hold her back. Much of the beginning of the book is devoted to comedy revolving around the premise, with “typical” high school romantic comedy situations made ridiculous by the setting and people doing it. The violence is over the top, but mostly seems to be inflicted on only one person, and you suspect that the majority of the plot of this 6-volume series will be devoted to our hero finding out why he’s been falsely imprisoned and what kind of place this is anyway.

So imagine my surprise when all that’s revealed by the end of the first book. The second half is still amusing, but gets far more serious. The teacher takes her eyes off her usual abuse target to send Eiri (the aforementioned tsundere who tries to be cool) to the infirmary, and we learn that Kyousuke may not be the only one who’s only here on a technicality. Through a series of fights, we also see that Kyousuke has an endurance that’s truly inhuman, which is of course what got him noticed in the first place. And then there’s Renko, the girl in the gas mask on the cover, whose bizarre, over the top genki personality takes a far darker turn when the mask comes off. The fight between her and Kyousuke at the climax is brutal, and the highlight of the book, particularly the resolution being the opposite of what you’d typically expect in this situation.

So yes, another book I expected not to enjoy but did. It’s not perfect – I am very weary with the loli teacher/parent concept, and the fact that Kurumiya appears to be a straight ripoff of Komoe-sensei from Index only evil did not help matters. I’m also not happy we appear to have more brother/sister incest shoehorned in, though at least it’s seemingly one-sided. And then there’s Maina, whose baby-talk way of speaking is grating and irritating, but I’m pretty sure that was deliberate and meant to be the same in Japanese, so I’ll give it a pass. In the meantime, it’s a fairly typical light novel recommendation: if you can deal with the typical romantic comedy cliches, and don’t mind lots of big chested vs flat chested talk, Psycome is an intriguing series, and I look forward to seeing where it goes next.