Book Log #82: Spiral, by Koji Suzuki
Oct. 15th, 2007 09:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperSpiral is Koji Suzuki's second installment in the Ring series, picking up pretty much immediately where the first book leaves off--and shifting over to a new protagonist, Mitsuo Ando, who is a former classmate of one of the characters who dies in the first book. Ando winds up being the doctor called upon to do the autopsy on his classmate, and is thus drawn into the events that roared through the plot of the first book.
This one didn't quite work for me as well, though. It suffered from a bit of one of the same issues I had with The Da Vinci Code when I tried to read it: i.e., way too much time spent on explaining Ando's efforts to decode the clues that are supposed to help him figure out what's going on. Between that and the time spent on explaining basic facts of DNA and RNA to the reader, I was bored more than once. There isn't enough Creepy in the plot to balance out all the genetics and code geeking, either--and most of the Creepy we do get is a rehash of what happened in Book 1, just getting introduced to a new set of characters.
There is some genuinely new Creepy in this book, though. Suzuki does do a good job of upping the stakes past what we got in Ring, even though most of the new spooky stuff doesn't come until the end. It's also hampered for me as a reader in that one of the aspects of the character of Sadako, the Big Bad in the plot, doesn't really work for me for reasons I won't get into until I read Loop--I want to see if the series overall balances that out. For now, for Spiral, let's say three stars.
This one didn't quite work for me as well, though. It suffered from a bit of one of the same issues I had with The Da Vinci Code when I tried to read it: i.e., way too much time spent on explaining Ando's efforts to decode the clues that are supposed to help him figure out what's going on. Between that and the time spent on explaining basic facts of DNA and RNA to the reader, I was bored more than once. There isn't enough Creepy in the plot to balance out all the genetics and code geeking, either--and most of the Creepy we do get is a rehash of what happened in Book 1, just getting introduced to a new set of characters.
There is some genuinely new Creepy in this book, though. Suzuki does do a good job of upping the stakes past what we got in Ring, even though most of the new spooky stuff doesn't come until the end. It's also hampered for me as a reader in that one of the aspects of the character of Sadako, the Big Bad in the plot, doesn't really work for me for reasons I won't get into until I read Loop--I want to see if the series overall balances that out. For now, for Spiral, let's say three stars.