Positively Loopy

I shouldn't really complain too mcuh about not liking The Loop by Koji Suzuki because I bought it for its pretty psychedelic cover.

It's meant to a be sequel to the two Ring books which were made into movies both here and in Japan. For those who missed them, these eminently credible horror movies involved a curse transmitted by watching a videotape imprinted by the mindpower of a troubled young woman who may have been dead at least some of the time. Perfectly normal and believable.

The sequel however just pushed the boundaries of believability a a bit too far - even for me reading this in the middle of the night while trying to feed a tiny baby.

I've never really "got" Japanese fiction. Not that I've read much besides Mishima and something by Haruki Murakami that may of may not have been Sputnik Sweetheart*. I don't know how much is cultural differences or bad translations.

SPOILER But putting all that aside, this book was seriously odd. It argued that the first two books had occurred within a computer simulation of the world that had started with just machine code for the physical world and evolution had happened in exactly the same way as in the "real" world down to people being exactly the same. And the curse of the Ring jumped from the computer simulation to the corporeal world. Spooky! END SPOILER

Yeah so um, not one to read in a hurry.

*There was lots of stuff about the Russian dog Laika orbiting the world but the only bit I really remember because it was so dumb was a two page explanation by this character of why she hadn't dyed her hair to meet someone for the first time who would have been expecting her to have black hair and now it was grey which depended on dye lasting about two days. Odd.