エス Esu

Occasionally quite creepy and suspenseful, but goes off the rails towards the end and falls flat.

Minor spoilers below
A stand-alone entry in the infamous “the Ring” series from Japanese fantasy- and horror author, Koji Suzuki. It's a generation and a half after the events in the first entry, and it builds heavily upon events and some of the descendants of former characters in the series. A CG artist receives a USB stick from an elusive older actress with a video of a guy hanging himself. He is supposed to analyze the video, presumably for film-production purposes, but he starts noticing weird things like the video changing every time he watches it. It quickly becomes apparent that there might me insidious forces working towards hurting and even killing Takanori and his pregnant wife Akane, who at the same time is being stalked by a mysterious man on the streets.

Suzuki writes in a very workmanlike fashion, but it fits the genre well, and especially a book like this where clarity is paramount as a lot of information from past and present is being juggled around at the same time.

So the first half of the book we are mainly following how Takanori is being haunted by the suicide video and how works to untangle a web of eerie clues that connect the suicide video to events and people in his life. This is the best part of the book and the one I enjoyed the most. Suzuki is good at creating suspense and implying scary implications by presenting us with, at first, limited knowledge through Takanori's eyes. The correlation between modern technology and the occult that appear frequently through the book through mediums such as USB sticks, GPS trackers, and car navigation systems is especially done well.

In the second half of the book, the book moves into the realm of science fiction, unfortunately at the cost of suspense and mystery. As Takanori learns more about the phenomena, the less scary it becomes, until the book simply dies out in a sort of anti-climax. Some of the information and science fiction concepts are quite interesting, but they are presented through very brutish exposition and through convoluted language. (Think Final Fantasy or any JRPG's story.)

On the other hand, some of the major questions (especially the antagonist's motives and parts of protagonist's background) that should have been answered clearly are simply left unanswered or used as set-up for the next book in the series. The answers we do get are mostly disappointing. Anti-climax.

Enjoyed it okay though, and was quite good up until the half-way point. Decent refresher and continuation of the Ring lore for the fans.