In his horror novel Ring, the basis for the 1998 Japanese movie Ringu and 2002's American remake The Ring, Koji Suzuki first established the idea of a videotape whose cryptic images somehow kill viewers after seven days. The book followed reporter Kazuyuki Asakawa and his unpleasant friend Ryuji Takayama as they investigated the videotape's source, trying to break the fatal curse before they succumbed to it. Eventually, their probe led to Sadako Yamamura, a murdered psychic whose powerful vengeance was spreading through the videotape. The book ended with Ryuji dead at Sadako's hands, and Kazuyuki certain that he'd found the key to surviving the curse: copying the tape and passing the infection to someone else.
The sequel, Spiral—the second in a trilogy that ends with the forthcoming Loop—begins with medical examiner Mitsuo Ando, an isolated, grieving, and distinctly creepy man just past the one-year anniversary of his son's drowning. After performing an autopsy on Ryuji's corpse, Ando finds signs of an anomalous, impossible disease, as well as a seemingly supernatural coded clue about its origins. Investigating further, he meets many individuals who assisted Kazuyuki's investigation, and he begins assembling the same puzzle, but from a pathologist's angle rather than a journalist's. As a result, Spiral reads more like a medical thriller than a horror novel, though in the end, it's another modern ghost story, with a "Boo!" at the end that trumps its predecessor's in scale.
In spite of its clever, chilling story, Ring was written like an amateurish beach-trip horror novel—sloppily and obviously, with overstated exposition and distracting, narratively lazy perspective shifts. Spiral improves on Ring by sticking closely to Ando's point of view, and by jacking up the IQ requirement a couple of notches, with Neal Stephenson-like divergences into cryptographic theory, DNA studies, and introductory genetics lessons, complete with charts and diagrams. Spiral can still be a slog in places, thanks to Suzuki's repeated, redundant plot recaps, but it's a smarter and tighter read than Ring.
If only it were as compelling. Midway through Spiral, Suzuki reveals what ultimately happened to Kazuyuki and his family, and shows why Kazuyuki's terrifying visions of a Sadako-spawned apocalypse couldn't possibly come to pass. Then he attempts to up the ante with a far more baroque and complicated scheme that spreads in too many directions, evoking cerebral rather than visceral horror. The new Sadako, textually dissected in detail, is considerably less frightening than the mysterious, alien monster at Ring's center. Still, fans of The Ring in all its various forms will inevitably want to tune in to see what the author intended for his video-haunting spirit. They just may be disappointed to find him grounding his creepy urban legend in hard science and dry classroom lectures.