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A review by pensnfeathers
Rings by Kōji Suzuki
3.0
Well, Ring was exactly "pretty good."
My first experience with horror as a media genre came 20 years ago when I saw "The Ring" with my friends at the movie theater. I cannot express enough how much that movie terrorized me. Ten-year-old me was traumatized. I slept in my parents' bedroom for several days afterwards, unwilling to be alone in the dark.
"Ring" the book feels much less like a horror novel and much more like a thriller. Part of that is, I'm sure my age. Horror movies and books do not scare 30-year-old me the way they scared 10-year-old me. But even so, I've read and enjoyed a lot of horror novels and a lot of thrillers, and this feels more like a thriller in almost every way.
That's not to say that it's bad. Like I said, it's pretty good. But a horror story written like a thriller kind of messes with the pacing. I think that's because Suzuki spends a good bit of time writing slow burn suspenseful horror scenes while pacing the book as a whole as a race against time. It usually works just fine, but when it doesn't it just doesn't feel right.
There's also a ton of very casual reference to sexual assault in this book. That actually doesn't bother me at all when it's purposeful, but in this case it mostly does very, very little for the plot. I'm willing to excuse that as a trope of early 90s Japanese horror literature, but it does stand out and that aspect of the novel ages pretty poorly.
Still, overall it's an excellent story sufficiently told. Exactly the kind of book that I say I'll read the sequel to, add it to my list, and then perhaps get to it a year or two down the road, or perhaps not.
My first experience with horror as a media genre came 20 years ago when I saw "The Ring" with my friends at the movie theater. I cannot express enough how much that movie terrorized me. Ten-year-old me was traumatized. I slept in my parents' bedroom for several days afterwards, unwilling to be alone in the dark.
"Ring" the book feels much less like a horror novel and much more like a thriller. Part of that is, I'm sure my age. Horror movies and books do not scare 30-year-old me the way they scared 10-year-old me. But even so, I've read and enjoyed a lot of horror novels and a lot of thrillers, and this feels more like a thriller in almost every way.
That's not to say that it's bad. Like I said, it's pretty good. But a horror story written like a thriller kind of messes with the pacing. I think that's because Suzuki spends a good bit of time writing slow burn suspenseful horror scenes while pacing the book as a whole as a race against time. It usually works just fine, but when it doesn't it just doesn't feel right.
There's also a ton of very casual reference to sexual assault in this book. That actually doesn't bother me at all when it's purposeful, but in this case it mostly does very, very little for the plot. I'm willing to excuse that as a trope of early 90s Japanese horror literature, but it does stand out and that aspect of the novel ages pretty poorly.
Still, overall it's an excellent story sufficiently told. Exactly the kind of book that I say I'll read the sequel to, add it to my list, and then perhaps get to it a year or two down the road, or perhaps not.