Spiral is the official sequel to Ring by Koji Suzuki, and picks up the story where the previous book ended, with Ryuji having died after saving Asakawa from Sadako’s torment. The autopsy is done by an old medical student friend in the form of Dr Ando, and it’s a chance meeting with Ryuji’s now ex-girlfriend, Mai Takano that Dr Ando too becomes involved with the mysterious Ring virus.
The first two thirds of the book starts off as a detective-like story, with Ando searchign for clues about the mysterious death of Ryuji, having found a strange tumour lodged near his throat and the discovery that it may be related to the small pox virus. What adds to his woes are that several other cases bring up the same causes of death, yet Ryuji’s is slightly different in that his DNA seems to contain an encoded message. The first message he seems to recieve is during the closing of the autopsy when a piece of news paper potrudes from Ryuji’s belly containing a simple code that spells out the infernal virus when decoded.
As the story continues, Ando becomes more and more the believer in things that are otherworldly than his scientific background, yet his background in science is what will eventually help him understand the codes that Ryuji is trying to send him from the other world.
What’s distracting is that the first part of the book deals with Ando, his failed marriage due to the loss of their son, and his grief over the incident. At first this seems to be the most important thing to Ando, and it’s touched upon throughout the book here and there, but it seems that Ando’s grief is easily dealt with unless it’s brought up.
His wife simply makes a cameo appearance, as does the son, and his grief has all but subsided when he’s at work, even when reminded of his son. I assume this part of the book is designed to create empathy for the character, but it does anything but that. You feel as though it’s been thrown together because the author couldn’t think of any other way to introduce him. The grief over his son and marriage doesn’t really come in to play until the final few pages in the book anyway.
The second part of the book turns the series, so far, on it’s head by offering an almost sci-fi horror theme to the book. We discover all manner of ideas and thoughts on the cloning process, about world domination and the extinction of the human species as we know it. Spiral begins to stretch out and become more than a little far fetched in the short amount of time it has to tell a tale, and therefore fails to convince or engage the reader in the belief that it actually could happen.
There are still some interesting twists on the Ring virus which offer some intriguing ideas about how it can change and develop into something else, and the various strains of the virus, as well as how it came to be in the body and how to solve it if discovered. Had these ideas been developed further rather than offering a predictable and weak path that is offered in the book, it could have made things a lot more interesting.
One of the chapters, and a continued theme, is the use of medical and scientific jargon. It’s almost as though you need a “Dummy’s guide to…” medicine by your side to understand half the things going. They discuss bases of DNA, DNA strands, RNA and more all of which is sort of explained, but it only confuses matters more when they actually explain the process. It’s like running round in circle and not being told you can stop in Swahili when you only speak English. How they expect anyone without a medical background to understand the concept of condons and bases in the DNA structure is beyond me. They even have a table or three offering an explanation of the structure.
If it’s disappointing enough to find that several pages are dedicated to scientific geek talk, we also find several pages in the story dedicated to retelling, in a short version, of Ring. Sure, Ring was an enjoyable book to read, but it does annoy that I could have just read Spiral and found out the plot of Ring and it’s character’s fate within a few pages. It’s a bit of a cop out as those pages should have been dedicated to Spiral, rather than rehasing an older tale.
Spiral is no where close to being as good as Ring is, and is a far fetched, stretching of the original Ring tale. I like the theories behind the Ring virus in Spiral, the idea that the Ring virus can evolve to something else is a sound one and logical, but the rest of the story drifts in and out of a ghost story to a sci-fi tale, and never really begins to mesh together or make a lot of sense.
Verdict: A flawed sequel, with some nice ideas, but badly thought out.