Reviews - Ring | The StoryGraph

1.76k reviews for:

Ring

Kōji Suzuki

3.57 AVERAGE

totallyboggus's review against another edition

2.25

dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

taytay_gray's review against another edition

2.25

adventurous dark mysterious slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: N/A

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

jesus_reads's review against another edition

4.0

dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

Creepy Atmosphere
Asakawa's fight for his life against the curse of the VHS tape feels both inescapable and consuming, drawing him deeper into long-forgotten mysteries.

antithet's review against another edition

4.0

I really enjoyed this. The week long deadline gave the story a quick pace that kept me reading for longer sessions than I normally achieve when reading a novel. Asakawa felt a little too weak a character for my liking though.

momoreading's review against another edition

3.75

dark medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

ac_church's review against another edition

2.0

I'm a huge fan of both Japanese Ringu films and their American counterparts, so naturally I was curious how it works in the original book form. Unfortunately, it just doesn't. Koji Suzuki's Ring is not a horror book at all, it's a mystery book through and through, and not a good one at that. All the iconic imagery from the films that haunts several generations to this day was designed by Hideo Nakata and his team, and subsequently punched up and made less subtle in Hollywood. Suzuki came up with a genius concept, but utterly beefed it on the execution.

Suzuki's book doesn't feature the Sadako yūrei at all - the victims die of a sort of supercharged heart attack with a sense of dread in the air. The Ringu tape is more of an abstract puzzle than the scariest snuff film known to man. Nobody crawls out of TVs (there's only one brief flashback scene involving Sadako telepathically manipulating one). Inconsistently, only one of the victims gets the fated phone call, and even then it is just silence on the other end.

Instead, the book is just a very drawn out, dated, sleepy exploration of the mysterious teen deaths and then Sadako's past. Complete with Sherlock-esque dialogues between the two amateur sleuths, constant "let's look at the clues we've discovered up to this point" moments, and multiple red herrings. Sure, it would have worked slightly better at the time when the clause of the Ringu Tape (the main mystery of the book, discussed in laborious detail) and the outline of Sadako's fate weren't among the most famous pieces of pop culture knowledge, but it still wouldn't be anywhere near as good as the films.

It lacks charismatic characters needed to make some of the more boring parts of detective fiction work. It fails to identify the absolute horror bonanza it has on its hands as the main asset, and goes in every direction available instead of the correct one. There's an icky obsession with sexual assault that goes absolutely nowhere and is handled so poorly. It's just a slog of a read, even at modest length.

There's exactly one scary and well-written sequence - Asakawa's arrival at the eerie liminal space of the resort and the discovery of the tape. Also, by the end of the book, Suzuki manages to cobble together some cool sci-fi ideas about informational viruses. That, plus the influence of the book on the stellar legacy of J-horror, are the only reasons I'm not giving it 1 star.