The Ring
A mysterious videotape warns that the viewer will die in one week unless a certain, unspecified act is performed. Exactly one week after watching the tape, four teenagers die one after another of heart failure. Asakawa, a hardworking journalist, is intrigued by his niece's inexplicable death. His investigation leads him from a metropolitan tokyo teeming with modern society's fears to a rural Japan--a mountain resort, a volcanic island, and a countryside clinic--haunted by the past. His attempt to solve the tape's mystery before it's too late--for everyone--assumes an increasingly deadly urgency. Ring is a chillingly told horror story, a masterfully suspenseful mystery, and post-modern trip. The success of Koji Suzuki's novel the Ringhas lead to manga, television and film adaptations in Japan, Korea, and the U.S.
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2recommend
3mentions
2people
2011–2023years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- "Southern Reach Trilogy" by Jeff VanderMeer [0]. I absolutely loved every book. "Annihilation" is probably my favorite.
What hooked me about the series were two things: 1) It was very, /very/ weird and 2) it often times felt like the characters had no power.
"Bliss Montage" by Ling Ma [1]. The short stories felt dreamy - drifting in perspectives, places, and times. Many of the stories had a supernatural aspect to them.
"Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino [2]. This book is a puzzle. You could read it front to back, or you could read it in the various different orders. There is no intended order. Again, very dreamy and weird. This book is a conversation, where Marco Polo is telling Genghis Khan of the cities within his kingdom. I was introduced to this book by Jacob Geller's video essay "Cities without people" [3].
"Ring" by Koji Suzuki [4]. One of my first horror book reads, and also the first in the Ring series. The "Ring" movies are based off of this book. I also read the 2nd one, which provides a very different view on the series and gives the horrors in the book a scientific backing.
This year for me has been the year of strange novels.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Reach_Trilogy
[1]: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374717124/blissmontage
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Cities
- Koji Suzuki's 'Ring' series - the novels on which the horror movies were based - has a very interesting slant on this idea; well worth reading. (Don't be misled by the movies: the second and third books in the trilogy are excellent speculative fiction!)
- One of the best works of fiction to tackle this subject was by Japanese writer Koji Suzuki. If the name's unfamiliar, read no further - MAJOR SPOILERS ahead!
The final book in the 'Ring' series (yes, that 'Ring' - the one with the creepy TV-crawling telekinetic dead girl) was a fascinating, philosophical, true 'science fiction' novel about the plight of AIs trapped in a simulation that was going horribly wrong... Well worth reading!
What struck me is that 'information' is a property/quality(?) that could cross the barrier between 'real' and 'simulation' - a sufficiently complex simulated being could theoretically make the leap into 'real' existence.
But there's always the other problem of turtles - all the way down (or up)... ;-) ('The Thirteenth Floor')
