A new guest has arrived.
"I heard a loud sound. I opened my eyes. It would seem the sturdy coffin that sealed me has been broken. Did someone do it on purpose? Or was it act of nature? I'll leave this coffin and fill my belly for the first time in a while. I'll eat without thinking of anything. I'll eat. Eat. Eat, eat, eat, and eat. It is, after all...My only happiness."
— Opening dialogue of Chapter 1
A young, carefree girl named Alice wakes up to find herself in Room 431 of a mysterious manor. There, she is greeted by Serpent, the head of the manor, who proceeds to tells Alice that as long as she is in her room, every wish and desire that she had would be granted instantly. But there is one condition to be obeyed: She must not leave the room under any circumstance, for if she did, her body would begin to rot, and the further she gets from her room, the more she would rot, until she eventually dies. What's more is that the only way to leave the manor is through Room 000, and to reach it, one must pass through every other room before theirs. Alice isn't fazed by this, though, and so she begins a long, painful journey to reach Room 000 and leave the manor for the outside world, meeting a variety of bizarre characters along the way.
Serialized from September 5 2016 to April 16 2018, Bibliomania is a 12-chapter-long Psychological Horror manga written by Orval (Oobaru) and illustrated by Macchiro. A post-apocalyptic, dark fantasy take on the classic tale of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland whose main themes involve discussions of desire and choosing to live in denial of the real world and stay within a fantasy world crafted by oneself. Unlike what one would expect from most other manga, Bibliomania is read in Western order, from left to right.
While the story starts out rather straightforward, it's revealed over the course of the comic that the main heroine isn't all that she appears on the surface.
Bibliomania contains the following tropes:
- After the End: The story takes place after the Book of Truth had ravaged the world in the Second Biblioclastic War.
- Animal Motifs:
- Butterflies are present in various scenes of the manga. Alice herself also has connections with them, such as with her hair bow resembling wings. Her Book of Truth form takes this further, with her having actual butterfly wings.
- Snakes are also very present (particularly with Serpent and the Book of Truth), further playing into the themes of desire and gluttony.
- Apocalypse How: Class 3A. As a result of Alice's obsession over literature and her desires to see the world, she created the Book of Truth that would end up causing the extinction of humanity.
- Body Horror: As Alice's body rots over the course of the comic, she ends up looking really gruesome, with various types of rot influenced by the rooms Alice has been in growing from her body, such as bird feathers, vines, and even a canine snout. It gets especially bad in Chapter 10, where her nails and fingers grow really long, her eyes become big and buggy, and her smile becomes unnaturally wide. Her giggling during the whole ordeal only serves to make it creepier. Then, there are the other guests Alice meets during that Chapter...
- Bungled Suicide: In the real world, the Judge was a student who was bullied by another classmate of his into hanging himself. It didn't work.
- Conlang: The text within this universe is written in an unknown language.
- Connected All Along: Chapter 12 reveals that Alice/The Book of Truth is Serpent's older sister, being that the latter is a low-page copy of the Book that was made for military purposes.
- Cosmic Horror Reveal: In the final chapter, it's revealed that Alice was a Transhuman Abomination all along and had already caused an Apocalypse How by the time of the story.
- Closed Circle: Thanks to the way in which the manor works, not even Serpent himself is able to leave until it's completely filled. Anyone who leaves their room will have their bodies rot until they die, and the potency of this effect will increase the lower their room number, with those in the rooms below Room 100 crumbling the very moment they enter their neighbor's rooms.
- Deadly Book: The Book of Truth that Alice had crafted. It's capable of absorbing the souls of people it enters contact with, scrolling their memories and emotions onto the pages as words. Unlike Serpent's version of the same book, which can only hold up to 666 pages, the real Book of Truth is able to hold infinite amounts of information.
- Escapism: Each of guests have a specific desire that the manor is designed to fulfill.
- The Judge wishes to get back at a classmate that had bullied him, and he vents his frustrations in his self-made Wonderland by endlessly judging and executing a caricature of said classmate.
- The Bird wishes to exist separately from humankind and the endless conflicts and borders they'd set up.
- The Hero wishes to avoid responsibility and live out his days as a comic book character he admired, slaying aliens and having hot women fawn over him.
- The Teacher wishes to live with his ideal family (i.e a loving wife and an obedient son).
- The Bog Woman wants to live forever as a young beautiful woman.
- Flashback B-Plot: For the first few chapters, we get glimpses into what Alice was doing before she had entered Serpent's manor/book.
- Flower Motifs: The Bog in Room 276 is filled with a variety of flowers. Flowers also form from the Bog Woman's hair.
- Foreshadowing:
- The fact that Alice is both not a normal girl and is up to something shady is foreshadowed in Chapter 5, which ends with a shot of her bedroom where people are tied up and screaming for help.
- The same shot of Alice's room has a hole in the roof that serves as illumination to the bed she was in. Said hole turns out to be the hole made in the coffin in the very first chapter. A view of this hole even appears in the first page of this manga, hinting that the bedroom was located in the coffin all along.
- Harsh Word Impact: When Alice questions the Hero about his authenticity, her speech bubble pierces through his chest.Alice: "You're...Not exactly young, are you...?"
- Me's a Crowd: The Researcher has several clones of himself tasked with assisting him in his studies. Towards the end of the chapter, Alice questions who is the real Researcher, which leads to the clones getting into a fight with one another.
- Number of the Beast: Serpent's manor is designed to hold 666 guests in it. When that number is reached, a "party" would be held to celebrate the manor's completion. And by "party", we mean "all of the manor's occupants would be merged with Serpent into a powerful being that would wreak havoc on the world".
- Off with His Head!: The Judge's main (if not only) form of executing "sinners" is to chop off their heads.
- Photographic Memory: Alice had possessed the ability to remember anything she's seen once. She took advantage of this ability to absorb every bit of knowledge she could at blinding speeds.
- Red Herring: The manga starts with what seems to be the Serpent breaking out of the "coffin" and destroying the world, as we see a boy looking at the monster and thinking it's a snake. The Serpent is actually still sealed by that time. Alice was the one that broke out, and as the original Book of Truth, she also has a slightly serpentine form.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Thanks to magical biblioclastic rounds, the Book of Truth ended up being sealed within a coffin for several centuries, bring the first Biblioclastic War to an end. Then, 1,786 months (approximately 148 years) and 24 days after that, lightning had struck the coffin and opened up a hole for the Book to escape from, kickstarting the second Biblioclastic War, which the book had won.
- Soul Eating: The Book of Truth (and copies of it such as Serpent) are able to consume the souls of humans, transcribing them into pages.
- Skull for a Head: A while after Alice encounters her, the Bog Woman's face completely decays, showing her head as a floating skull missing a lower jaw.
- Speech-Bubbles Interruption: When Serpent asks Alice if she's listening to him while she's explaining how she didn't die and turn into words when the rot overtook her body, his speech bubble nearly obscures hers.
