A very weird book. Delightfully so. I will preface this that if you really loved Ring, this might not be the book for you. It re-contextualizes quite a bit and goes in extremely disparate and bizarre directions that if you are firmly a fan of j-horror spooky ghost stories: will NOT be your thing. If you, like me, love when an author is just putting anything in the book? This one has it all.

The biggest thing I noticed was how much more muscular Suzuki's writing is in this one. Ring was a well-plotted mystery, but it was written very utilitarian, whereas Spiral has much more descriptive language, incisive observations about the characters and their interactions, and one of his finest protagonists yet in Dr. Ando. The death of Ando's young son creates a very compelling figure to follow, as he is not so wrought with despair as to be non-functioning, but it colors a lot of his interactions with others and the decisions he makes. We follow his thought process closely, see him react with disgust at his own impulsive thoughts and his train of logic as he's solving the various puzzles throughout the book. While in Ring, I was captivated by the thrill of the mystery, Spiral gives me much more to chew on in regards to its protagonist.

I do think the beginning is much slower than Ring, though, and it wasn't until nearly 100 pages in that I found the big hook for the mystery. It's a sharp contrast to the instant hit of Ring: Tomoko dies after watching the tape, Asakawa begins the investigation. Spiral has a lot of, and I mean a lot of scientific discussions about genetics and DNA to the point it becomes borderline science fiction. The book takes many distinct diversions to make sure that the reader understands the differences between DNA and genes, how codons function and what the letters inscribed on them correspond to, and what those letters mean. I am by no means a smart man, so those passages required me to re-read them like I was in school again, desperately trying to comprehend my schoolwork.

The final half is also a little bit too breakneck for my liking. It feels like things build to the finish a little too quick; as if Suzuki was getting too excited by what he was writing to let things breathe a little. The actual ending wins me over so much though that I'm willing to accept this.

Plus, the horror is great. It's a very disquieting book. I find it interesting how I had heard that Ring was the horror book but Spiral was the science book, but I found the opposite to be true. Ring was very much a mystery novel, whereas Spiral deals in much more supernatural horrors that had me a little unnerved while reading. It also goes into some truly bizarre thematic angles, some so bizarre I genuinely can't tell you anything about them here as they are way too big a spoiler and the thrill of discovering them was incredible page-turning material.

I will say, though, I love the scene where Ando has to borrow a word processor from a colleague to print out a report, and the book gets great narrative tension out of how brutally slow those old things were. Each page takes minutes to print and he is just anxiously sitting by the window waiting for the damned thing to work. Part of me wonders if that was Suzuki fictionalizing his own frustrations with word processors of the day.

Really enjoyed Spiral, and am excited to jump into Loop. Suzuki clearly got better at writing between Ring and Spiral, so I'm anticipating for Loop to be even more well-written and even more astonishingly absurd.

Spiral

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Spiral (2005)

Spiral (2005)

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