【Review/Praise】
"A romantic meditation on death by a snail—it's drawing a snail, but it's also drawing me. Office workers are probably all like this: every day hoping the earth will explode, but never actually ending our own lives, living on either by inertia or for some reason we can't bring ourselves to die for... In short, if we're all just waiting anyway, we might as well enjoy the present." — Reader review

"Perhaps everyone, at some point in life, has asked questions about death, more or less. What does death feel like? What is it like after? These are questions we cannot answer, yet we cannot help but think about them, instinctively fear them, and freely imagine them." — Reader review

"This palm-sized picture book manages, with the softest brushstrokes, to pry open the hardest existential anxiety of modern people: we have a happiness checklist, yet we've lost the ability to be happy." — Reader review

★ Douban rating: 8.3. Ranked No. 9 in Douban's 2025 China Literature Non-Fiction category. From the author of Ten Years of Letters Between Two Ordinary Women.
★ The debut philosophical healing picture book by Wu Shiqi, using the softest brushstrokes to pry open the hardest existential anxiety of modern life: "We have a happiness checklist, yet we've lost the ability to be happy."
★ The snail seriously considers various ways "to die": being stuffed to death by cherries, falling into eternal sleep among datura flowers, worrying about messy hair before being struck by lightning, with its ultimate dream being to "vanish into dust" beneath the Alaskan aurora. These absurd yet romantic death fantasies are, in fact, the deepest attachment to "living."
★ Precisely captures the contemporary psyche of "too burnt out to live, too afraid to die": "No, no, no—I don't long for death. I'm afraid of dying. But all things have their time. I only wish to live with hope, and to depart in peace."
★ Dedicated to everyone who "often wishes the world would end, yet loves it with all their heart." Every one of us is a tiny snail, living toward death.

Through the eyes of a small snail, this book seriously and romantally explores a question that everyone has thought about but rarely speaks aloud: how to die.
The snail compiles a "death checklist": being stuffed to death by cherries, falling into eternal sleep among datura flowers, worrying about whether its hair will be messy before being struck by lightning, with its ultimate dream being to "vanish into dust" beneath the Alaskan aurora. These absurd yet romantic death fantasies make readers laugh, only to suddenly realize—the snail thinks so carefully about death precisely because it is so deeply attached to being alive.
The book contains an extraordinarily honest confession: "No, no, no—I don't long for death. I'm afraid of dying. But all things have their time. I only wish to live with hope, and to depart in peace." This passage precisely captures the contemporary psyche of being "too burnt out to live, too afraid to die"—it's not that we truly want to leave, but that we are simply too tired, and need a place to lay down the exhaustion we cannot put into words.
The snail says in the book: "I think I should be happy. I have so many reasons to be happy, yet the disappointing me still occasionally wants to give up on life." This seemingly contradictory statement voices what so many people feel. The author uses the snail's slowness, its shell, its softness to draw every fragile yet still-striving ordinary person.

This is not a book that teaches you to "think positively." It is a book that says "it's okay if you can't figure it out." It offers no answers—only companionship. When death becomes a comic strip, we see the essence of fear more clearly: it is not an ending, but the regret of unfulfilled wishes. Dedicated to everyone who "often wishes the world would end, yet loves it with all their heart."

Wu Shiqi
Illustrator and picture book artist.
Notable works: Picture book "How Can a Snail Die?"; comics "Agua & Ada"; co-authored literary work "Ten Years of Correspondence Between Two Ordinary Women" (with Cactus Loves Water).
"Ten Years of Correspondence Between Two Ordinary Women" ranked No.9 in Douban's 2025 Annual Chinese Non-Fiction category!