On Koji Suzuki's Ring Hexalogy

Remember Gore Verbinski’s 2002 horror movie The Ring (starring Naomi Watts)?

Well I don’t, because I fell asleep halfway through. 

Luckily, though, this remake of the 1998 Japanese movie Ringu at least introduced us in the West to what is actually a great series of Japanese horror stories. (In fact, we can basically thank Verbinski for starting the Japanese horror craze on our shores altogether.) 

Before even the Japanese film Ringu, though, was the 1991 Koji Suzuki novel of the same name. The book was immensely popular (rightly so) and spawned what is - at least so far - a hexalogy of books:

Ring

Spiral

Loop 

Birthday (a collection of three novellas)

S*
Tide*

(As S and Tide have not yet been translated into English, I haven't read/can't discuss them. But S is finally getting its US release in just a couple months!)

If you've seen any of the movies in the series - whether any of the five Japanese movies or four American - you're probably at least mildly familiar with the overall trope:

A mysterious video tape appears, filled with eerie, disturbing images. At the end of the tape is a message - something to the effect of "You will die in seven days, if you don't..." But of course the end of the tape cuts off, and you don't really know what you're supposed to do to avoid being murdered. Well shucks.

Oddly, this is more or less the basic premise of all of the movies...and yet only the first novel. 

Much like the movie sequels, I had expected the second book, Spiral, to continue on the mystery of the killer video tape. And yet, to my pleasant (if morbid) surprise, Spiral ended up taking the story in a wildly different direction. Weird that the movies (and even the five-part manga series, which I haven't yet mentioned) all basically ignored the overall story from this point onward.

Ring is a stylish, incredibly inventive psychological horror. (See The Four Main Types of Horror for a reminder, if you need.) It features the dreadful mood and tension so predominant in the genre, and a terrifying mystery that unravels like a slow poison - contrasting wonderfully with the protagonist's veritable race against the clock. (And, by the way, if you haven't seen the movies nor had the ending ruined for you, the book really is highly clever and surprising.) 

Spiral, though, gives us half a psychological horror, but smoothly moves the book into more of a body horror. Clever transition, that. Instead of the book being all about a mysterious, deadly, supernatural object, we now have a scientific/medical approach to the entire ordeal. 

Equally clever is how the third book, Loop, takes the body horror of Spiral, then moves the series in the direction of sci-fi. Here, many of the scarier elements of the series are lost, but replaced with what is a truly mind-blowing coup d'etat compared to everything else in the series. 

(And, lest I forget: Birthday mostly goes back to the psychological brand of horror, which makes sense, considering that two of the three novellas in it are prequels to Ring.)

It's a smooth trick that Suzuki plays on us throughout the series, morphing the genre each step of the way.

More than even this unique genre-shift, though, is the way Suzuki plays with everything we think we know about the universe of Ring:

Most stories give us at least some sort of a resolve by the end. Even if it's not entirely complete, we generally have a good idea of the how and the why behind everything. 

Indeed, Ring basically unravels the history and secrets of the video tape by its final page, much as you'd expect would happen. And yet only a fraction of the way into Spiral, I found myself a bit dumbfounded, asking, "Wait - that's what's actually going on here?" What we discover in Spiral completely subverts what we learned in Ring.

It was a fantastic trick which I, at least, didn't see coming. 

Perhaps even more fantastic is that, by the end of Spiral, we realize what's really going on...but only until halfway through Loop, when we are doubly dumbfounded and doubly shocked to find out what's actually, really, for-reals-this-time going on. 

People often use the phrase "tour de force" when describing a book. I don't generally like the expression in this sense (one, because it's become highly overused, and two, because most books really aren't actually "tour de forces"), but I can think of no more appropriate book/series that has earned the label. 

The way the series evolves from Ring through Spiral and into Loop - in both the shifting genres, as well as the genius plot evolution - is nothing short of mind-bending. Give it a go.