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Monday, 11:07 pm in Books & Comics

So, tonight in between MythBusters and a very unappealing South Park episode (is it just me, or do they get more conservative right-wing as the series goes on?), I finished Spiral today. Spiral, of course, being book 2 in Koji Suzuki’s runaway Ring series.

First off, for those of you who’ve seen Ring 2 (the Japanese one, at least, I’ve no idea about the American version and honestly I don’t care much; Spiral as it is just wouldn’t work with Samara; full stop), forgeddaboutit. Any New Wave J-Horror buff worth his weight in videtape knows that Ring 2 was a (a-har) pure mutation, created out of desperation because Ring’s originally sequel, Raisen flopped so damn badly. I remember when ~wolf [h] and I watched ~matt’s Ring DVD way back when we watched the Raisen trailer and then – when I finally got around to watching Ring 2 – I wondered why the hell they were totally different. Well, that’s why. The point being that Raisen is much closer to Spiral, so I’ll give you guys a few minutes to read over Snowblood’s review.

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Okay, so now you know the basic set-up for the book (plus or minus a few details), it beggars the question; was the thing any good?

Well… I dunno. The first thing I suppose I should say that Spiral isn’t a horror book by any stretch of the imagination. It’s more like one of those medical thirllers, only with added supernatural elements. Except… not really, since all of the ‘supernatural’ Sadako-stuff is more-or-less explained away as being scientific; albeit a kind of science that’s not fully understood. Nor is the book particularly thirlling; it reads more like a staircase of cyphers, with the reader being not much more than a slinky tipping down one after the other with no real thought being invested (kind of like The Da Vinci Code). At one point the story looks as if it’s going to branch a little, but that soon dries up and is all-too-quickly absorbed back into the main plotline. Protagonist Ando just kind of drifts gormlessly from one plot point to another, and the book isn’t so much about him trying to figure out a mystery as it is him investigating a series of fairly self-evident clues. When the book’s only real ‘mystery’ shows up, it’s fairly obvious within about the first five seconds what’s happened, though it takes Ando and sidekick Miyashita another couple of hundred pages to work out exactly what’s gone wrong.

The other thing is that, unlike Ring, there’s no sense of urgency. No seven-day-countdown. The videotape is there, of course, but it’s sort of… abstract, and neither of the main characters is exposed to it directly. Only Mai (whom we may remember as serial-fantasy-rapist Ryuji’s grilfriend from the Ring) actually watches the tape, then destroys it. She doesn’t die.

And that’s the other thing, really. Spiral more-or-less rewrites some of the most fundamental parts of the original Ring mythos in order to be more ‘scientific’. Firstly, though the body count is reasonable, it all happens “off screen” – most of the corpses we’ve already seen before in Ring – and most of the discussion about the video deaths revolves around the smallpox/virus idea that is touched upon at the end of the first book. Sadako’s victims, we learn, all died from blockages in the coronary artery caused by a smallpox induced sarcoma.

… I’m sorry but, what? I thought Sadako’s victims died because at the moment of death they saw her creepy fucking eye and died of fright. Gone too is the description of the bodies as having that horrific death-grimace and, let’s face it, that was the fucking scariest thing about the films. (Interestingly, Snowblood mentions something like this in their review for Raisen; since it was undoubtedly written before the book’s translation, I suppose they didn’t know that this is, in fact, not the fault of Raisen but of its source material.) Instead, large slabs of the book are dedicated to discussing how the curse video kills by inducing a kind of smallpox though for all the wafting on about the subject the protagonists never manager to find an explanation for how other than the obvious one we’ve known all along; magic (or, more specifically, Sadako’s psychic powers working themselves from beyond the grave wooOOOOoooOOOOooo!). So for all the pseudo-scientific talk about genes and DNA, all we’re really left with is exactly the answer we knew all along.

Being a Japanese book with a male author, Spiral also suffers from that kind of general unconscious Japanese misogyny. This manifests itself almost at the start of the book when Mai is seen to stumble by Ando who then immediatley uses his Doctor Powers to deduce this is because she is “weak from menstruation”. No I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a lot of side effects from menstruation – cramps, bloating, feeling generally grumpy and awful, incurable headaches, a weird urge to clean everything up – but this has never been one of them. This weirdly incongruous scene at the start of the book is only compounded by the various bits of Mai and Ando internal-dialogue; Ando lusting after Mai because of her stereotypically Japanese ‘virginal beauty’, Mai with her almost naieve yet predatory treatment of Ando (and Ryuji with his rape fetish, which may or may not have been fantasy, but always struck me as being really… Japanese somehow). Even Sadako ‘hirself’, but I’ll get to that in a minute. Eventually Mai’s menstruation turns into a plot point, which makes the initial scene seem even more ham-fisted. Male authors; go figure.

So we finally get to Sadako who, as you might have guessed, actually makes fairly substantial appearances in Spiral. By the end of the book I was left feeling like I’d been reading a less visceral and more ‘scientific’ version of Tomie. For those not down with the manga (or films), Tomie is a… thing that appears as a beautiful girls who preys on men. Men are attracted to Tomie; violently so, and all her relationships inariably end with her being murdered. Kinda, because being a …thing, Tomie has the power to regrow multiple copies of herself from any chunk; cut Tomie in half and get two Tomies, who invaraibly fight one another (“There can be only one!”).

By the end of Spiral, Sadako has turned into a kind of reverse-Tomie figure; instead of destroying the copies of herself she is instead intent on creating more. Oh, and did the author mention that this is related to the notion of a virus and genetic mutations; in case you didn’t get it the first ten thousand times it was suggested. Which isn’t to say the idea isn’t without merit. The other fundamental piece of Ring-mythos that gets re-written in Spiral is the whole “break the curse by showing the tape to someone else” thing. ‘WTF?’ factor asides (since, arguably, along with death-by-fear-of-Sadako, this is like the biggest ‘signature’ mark of the Ring series), the way it’s introduced is actually pretty interesting. Remeber the whole panic in the first book comes from the fact the Cabin Kids who first discovered the tape recorded over the “to not die, make a copy and show this to someone else” bit as a prank (apparently no-one ever told Sadako about degredation in the fidelity of media copied via analogue means, but oh well). Spiral postulates that this ‘recording over’ actually changed the ‘genetic code’ of the curse tape itself; effectivley removing the stop to the curse. Which in itself is an interesting idea…

Or would be, if it weren’t for the fact that what replaces it is simply not consistant. So some people die, some don’t, and we’re only ever given a kind of half-arsed explanation as to why. In Mai’s case it’s fair enough (note: don’t ever watch Ring while ovulating), but protagonist-from-the-first-book Asakawa? Here Suzuki’s attempts to blend to two ‘strands’ of the Ring Virus together in a narrative whole kind of break down into the word of “… er, okay man, if you say.” Suzuki plays with some interesting ideas (changing the tape changes the curse; the whole idea of ‘ghost’ airwaves that get a brief mention in Ring) but seems to discard them all in an attempt to pursue what essentially amounts to pseudoscientfic gobbledegook. Ring and Sadako work so much better on a paranormal level; something which is lost when they’re reduced to DNA and smallpox and asexual reproduction. Remember in the frist book we discover that Sadako has ‘testicular feminization’, also known as androgen insensitivity syndrome; essentially she is female but has male chromosomes and testicles. (This is also why she’s described as being beautiful; women with complete AIS are renowned for being tall and lithe with perfect skin and features.) Well, in Spiral Sadako grows a womb as well as testes, and much to her delight finds that she can ‘ejaculate’ and reproduce asexually (never mind that except in the most mild cases, both men and women with AIS are infertile). Now, I’m all for hermaphrodites and all [hugs her Loki-plush], but I have to say I don’t really find them scary. Not scary like, say, little ghost girls with hair over their faces and creepy fucking eyes.

The book ends with a small jab at the media (meme, anyone?), which is mostly lost under the author’s apparent subconscious fear of women. Sadako’s new scaryness is now not because she’s a creepy ghost-girl but because she’s going to turn the world into her, with the operative word her being her. Oh, and did the author mention she can do it all by herself; sorry men, you’re now redundant. This theme is not new; it pops up pretty routenely in Japanese horror, Tomie being the other obvious example.

I guess in the end, Spiral is the sum of it’s flaws. It does fill in the story of the Ring Virus, but in doing so destroys pretty much everything that was originally scary aboutt he story. And while it does raise a few interesting questions towards the end (does the new Sadako-species have as much of a right to live as the human race?), these aren’t really explored. Not to mention that – in the Grand Tradition of Killing Joke that I’m sure ~Random [h] will tell you how I love to harp on about – they are raised by a ‘bad guy’ and therefore easily brushed aside.

In the end, selfishness and apathy ‘win’ the day. Maybe under those circumstances the human race does deserve to die out. The end result, however, is a weirdly unsatisfying Kairo-style apocalyptic scenario.

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In other news, CodeGrrl updated their forums and now I can’t log in. The little voice whispers that  I got surreptitiously banned for being a smartass… but I doubt it’s. It’s probably got more to do with the fact I have a space in my username (the new Invision board has seperate display and login names) but yanno.