Stunning Japanese novel with a chilling twist - the follow-up to Ring and Spiral.
Kaoru's father, Hideyuki, lies dying in a Tokyo hospital, his body ravaged by viral cancer. This nightmarish incurable disease has sprung out of nowhere and has begun to affect organisms all over the planet.
Twenty years ago Hideyki worked on a virtual reality project which replicated evolution on earth, called the Loop. The project failed when the organisms within it inexplicably stopped reproducing normally and started cloning. Nearly all of the other scientists who worked on the Loop are already dead - from cancer.
To get to the heart of the mystery, Kaoru must travel to the other side of the planet, to the Mojave Desert. The secret he encounters there will overturn everything he thought he knew about the world - and his own identity.
In this suspense-filled follow-up to 'Ring' and 'Spiral', Suzuki masterfully confounds the reader with a stunning new twist on the Ring mythology.
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[He opened the sliding glass door, and the smell of the sea poured into the room]***
(HarperCollins, 5 June 2009, first published 1998, 480 pages, ebook from @AmazonKindle)
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I loved the first two books, Ring and Spiral, especially the latter so I was really looking forward to the concluding book of the trilogy, Loop. This an okay book but does not reach the same heights as the other books. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite live up to its expectations or possibilities. The book has potential to be brilliant with the Ring virus having become distorted into an incurable form of cancer. There are a few issues with the book. The first issue is how dry and dull it is for more than half of it. The book is so flat and dull I struggled to get through it. The characters are bland and insipid. The biggest issue is how the book explains the creation of the Ring virus and how it became cancer which tears awful holes in the apocalyptic events of Ring and Spiral. The first two books are genuinely creepy and unsettling. Loop is none of these things. I'm so disappointed.
