‘Ring’ – Koji Suzuki (Harper)

 

Page Count: 367 Pages

Excuse me while I vent, just a little bit… Yesterday was a crappy one; in the morning I found out that my teams function is being outsourced and my job will come to an end at the beginning of September. To be honest, I did see it coming but I didn’t see it coming yesterday morning :o(

Life just got a little more complicated and I’m not sure what this will mean for the blog. I suspect I’ll be trying to strike a balance between job-hunting and letting off steam here by talking about books and stuff. We’ll see how it goes…

Thanks for bearing with me, ‘normal service’ will now resume. Sorry about that :o)

Anyway… While I’ve seen ‘Ringu’ and ‘The Ring’ (1 & 2), I’ve never come across any of the books that the films were based on; until the other day :o) I was passing through Greenwich, saw ‘Ring’ in Waterstones and thought to myself, ‘it’s now or never, isn’t it?’

So…

Doomed to die, one way out, one week to find it.

The body of a young girl is found at her home in Yokahoma, contorted in fear, but the cause of her death is a mystery. Soon afterwards, the bodies of three more teenagers are discovered – dead in chillingly similar circumstances.

Sensing a story, journalist Asakawa becomes fixated on unravelling the cause of this bizarre sudden-death syndrome. He discovers that the four victims had shared a log cabin for one night, exactly seven days before their deaths.

In the cabin, Asakawa finds a nigtmarish secret – a curious videotape that plays a strange collection of abstract, subliminal images, concluding with a portentuous message…

‘Those who have viewed these images are fated to die at this exact hour one week from now. If you do not wish to die, you must follow these instructions exactly…’

Then the tape cuts to static.

I’ll come straight out and say it. There is a lot to enjoy in ‘Ring’ but it is all wrapped up in the driest prose that I’ve read in a long time. I know it’s a translation so it could be that the book was translated either not quite well enough or perhaps a little too well, I don’t know. Either way… I found it to be a bit of a slog to get through and I’d also say that it’s one thing to have a mystery but as mysterious as it may be, it needs to be happening to characters that the reader cares about. That wasn’t the case here. I ended up reading ‘Ring’ more to find about Sadako than anything else. And to be fair, I had already seen the movies first.

It is worth sticking with ‘Ring’ though as you wil find a lot more context around Sadako that, in my opinion, explains the mystery more effectively than the ‘mindless rage’ of Sadako in the movie. Don’t get me wrong, I like how the movie makes it all inexplicable but watching the pieces fit together here is, eventually, worth the price of admission. I thought it was very cleverly done and the images, from the video tape, make more a lot more sense.

I don’t think ‘Ring’ is a bad book. Like I said, there is a lot to enjoy here but the book really made me work for it and in a way that I didn’t really think was necessary. Maybe this is one for someone who is more of a ‘literary horror’ fan than I am? Either way, I’ll probably stick with the films going forwards.