This was originally written for my blog over at http://turnthepage.travel.blog/2019/04/26/spiral-by-koji-suzuki/

This book is the sequel to Ring, but it is designed to be able to be read as a stand alone novel. However, this review will contain some spoilers for those who haven't read Ring so if you wish to read that book first then do not continue reading this review.

This book starts off where Ring ended. The protagonist in this book is a pathologist named Ando who is haunted by the death of his young son who drowned two years prior. Ando works in a morgue conducting autopsies and is tasked with the autopsy of Ryuji, who was one of the protagonists in Ring. Ryuji and Ando were friends throughout college so naturally Ando is saddened to learn of Ryujis death, especially at such a young age. After finishing the autopsy Ando stuffs Ryujis body with newspapers to replace the space of his removed organs.

After sewing the cadaver back up, a piece of newspaper manages to find a way to protrude from a gap. Ando inspects the page and sees a series of numbers on it. He remembers how, during college, his classmates used to create codes and enjoy seeing who could solve the code first. Ryuji was always the best at this and he was also the one who could always make the codes that could never be cracked. Ando is convinced that the numbers on the newspaper must be a code of some sort, and Ryuji is trying to communicate with him from beyond the grave.

Ando solves this code in a coffee shop later that day. The numbers spell out one word - R I N G. Is it a coincidence that these numbers spelled a word, or is his old college pal really trying to tell him something?

I enjoyed this book entry bit as much as Ring, with one exception - I hated the Epilogue. It was a short chapter, and in my opinion it just was not needed. It felt like a quick way to wrap everything up but I felt that if the chapter before that was the end then it would have been much better. At times the medical jargon was a bit too much and I found myself skimming, but it didn't detract from the story as everything is explained in layman's terms too.

I also felt that this book would have been a bit confusing to read without reading Ring first, although out was designed to be able to be enjoyed that way. I felt that it didn't explain enough of Ring to show why certain things were important or relevant, but as I read Ring first it is difficult for me to judge this.

This book had far more creepy parts to it than Ring. My favourite part is when Ando visits Mai's apartment. I'm sure most people who have read the book will agree with me when I say that chapter will be the cause of many nightmares for years to come.

Overall I loved this book and would highly recommend it to fans of Ring, or other supernatural Japanese horror. ( )

As interesting as a psychic, smallpox carrying, hermaphrodite who gives birth to herself could have been, I think Mr. Suzuki didn't do it justice. I am still deciding if I am going to read the last book in the series. ( )

The hackneyed plot, especially the ending, lets the whole book down... I was quite prepared to enjoy it, (the DNA codes were a bonus) but I can't deal with the uninspired ending. I like Suzuki's ability to blur the boundaries between reality and imagination, but this book might have pushed it a bit too far for me. ( )

the writing is pretty meh but the premise is gr8. i love my wife Sadako ( )

Spiral begins hours after Ring's ending and stars Ando, a medical examiner who was once classmates with Ryuji, one of the main characters in Ring. Ando performs Ryuji's autopsy and is intrigued by several findings. First, Ryuji died of sudden heart failure despite being otherwise very healthy. Second, he has a mysterious ulcer in his throat. Further tests eventually reveal that Ryuji may have been killed by a virus that bears an eerie resemblance to smallpox. As Ando investigates, he learns of several other victims. But how is the virus transmitted? What does it do? And why did one man who was exposed to it, Asakawa, survive? The case takes on greater urgency when Mai, Ryuji's lover, disappears. Was she exposed via Ryuji somehow, and can she still be saved?

I highly recommend that those who haven't read the first book, Ring, do so before reading this one. And then maybe just stop there. Although Spiral tied up a few of Ring's loose ends, I didn't consider it to be a worthwhile continuation.

Suzuki attempted to make Sadako's curse more scientific rather than supernatural in this book, and it really didn't work for me. I could accept that the curse was virus-like in its transmission and requirements, but Suzuki also had it behavingboth like a sperm and an egg (just because it happened to sort of look like them?). Also, Suzuki envisioned DNA producing exact replicas of people, right down to their memories up to some point before their original death ("junk DNA" is a recording of a person's memories, or some nonsense like that). This went way beyond what I was willing to accept, even in a horror series featuring a killer videotape.

And the part where Suzuki gave Ryuji a special ability to communicate with Sadako made me want to bite something. There was no sign that Ryuji had any kind of paranormal abilities - he should not have been able to form an agreement with Sadako the way he did, or use his own corpse to create codes for Ando to decipher. And Sadako, considering her history, should have hated a rapist like Ryuji too much to let him somehow use her own abilities.

There were a few nicely creepy scenes, but for the most part Ring had a better and more unnerving atmosphere than Spiral. Ando spent a lot of time trying to figure out the stuff Asakawa had already figured out in the first book, and a little more time trying to figure out what Asakawa hadn't gotten wrong. There were a couple code deciphering sections that reminded me of parts of works like Soji Shimada's The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, inviting readers to decipher the codes along with Ando, but those ended up feeling more like filler than anything particularly useful. And speaking of filler, there was a excruciating 20-page summary of everything that happened in Ring, because apparently Suzuki couldn't trust that readers of Spiral had read the book before it. Yes, this section tied in with a discovery later in the book, but Suzuki could have accomplished the same thing in a couple pages.

Spiral reminded me a great deal of Hideaki Sena's Parasite Eve in the way it tried to incorporate science into its horrific supernatural developments, and also in the way it crapped on most of its few female characters.

I was cautiously optimistic that Mai would be a main character I could actually root for, despite her unfortunate affection for Ryuji. She seemed to be reasonably intelligent and not too much of a wet washcloth. Whereas Ando developed an instant crush on Mai, she spoke to him mostly out of a wish to maintain a connection to Ryuji and wasn't the slightest bit interested in any other sort of relationship with him. At the same time, she wasn't so attached to Ryuji as to fall completely apart after his death. She kept her professional commitments in mind and tried to fulfill them.

Unfortunately, my expectation that Mai would turn out to be one of the main characters of this book, working with Ando the way Ryuji worked with Asakawa in the first book, turned out to be way off the mark. After a couple on-page appearances, she disappeared from the text except as occasional motivation for Ando. Her ultimate fate depressed me, as did Suzuki's reduction of women of child-bearing age to nothing more than potential incubators for Sadako.

Some of Ando's thoughts about Mai were bizarre and made me wonder if Suzuki had any idea about how female bodies work. When I first started the book, I snickered at the way Ando instantly concluded that Mai must be having her period because of one vague sentence from her and the fact that she looked pale. While I realize that some women have overly heavy or lengthy periods that can give them anemia, considering the situation I'd have assumed that Mai was pale because she was in shock at having discovered Ryuji's body only a few hours earlier. This thing about Mai having her period came up multiple times in the book, with Ando concluding each time that his intuition must have been correct. Ando also seemed to think it was perfectly natural for a grown woman's used underwear to smell like milk (yes, there's a part where he sniffs her underwear - it's one of the first things he does when he's left alone in her apartment).

I doubt I'll be continuing this series, and I kind of wish I had stopped after reading Ring. The new developments in Spiral made me more angry than excited. One thing I was left with was a desire to find and read more Japanese horror written by women. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like much has been translated into English. I've already read Mariko Koike's The Graveyard Apartment and would welcome other recommendations.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) ( )