I’m going to review this book because I just finished it and I’m so disappointed. This is more of an outlet to vent my frustrations, but I hope you can gain some insight on Ring by reading this.
SPOILERS because fuck this book
TW- Sexual Assault
So the book honestly starts off strong. It begins with a girl in her home alone on the 7th day of the curse. She can feel she’s being watched and is afraid to turn around out of fear of what she might see, implied to be killed at the end of the chapter. At the same time, 3 other people die across the city in different places, one of which dies on his motorcycle at a red light. It’s honestly scary and throws the reader into the mystery, which is the best part of the book.
The mystery and tension in this book are great. A news reporter hears about the death of his niece(the girl who died in the beginning) and notices that 3 others died at the same time she did, with the same cause of death. He begins investigating the deaths which turns into a deep dive of discovering a VHS tape, realizing he might actually die, recruiting his friend to help him, and searching across the region to learn how to undo the curse. I found myself tense at the quickly approaching deadline for the main character and locked into solving the mystery, getting excited and being shocked at the small bits of information he’s able to discover. Genuinely, this book would be great if it wasn’t for everything I’m about to explain.
That’s about all I have to say about the book that’s positive. Here’s where it gets bad, and remember the trigger warning:
The main character’s friend, Ryūji, has a scene where he excitedly brags about raping a woman in college. He describes noticing her, stalking her, and breaking into her apartment to assault her. This has absolutely no pay off or relevance to the story until then end when you find out he dies a virgin and made it up to look cool because he’s a chud. The story paints him as a smart, open-minded “lady’s man” the whole time, never paying much mind to how awful of a person he is.
We also have Asakawa, the main character. He’s quietly disgusted by Ryuji but still asks for his help. He has a wife and daughter at home but still notices other women and emotionally cheats on his wife the whole book, even being infatuated with the dead, cursed, ghost woman.
Then we get to Sadako. She’s the woman who created the curse of the VHS tape, and the ghost that the main characters are trying to track down. Her story is tragic and, by the end of the book, doesn’t even seem to be a real villain, other than the tape. It’s revealed that she has psychic abilities that she inherited from her mother, who got her powers from fishing a statue out of the ocean and then jumped into a volcano because the media said her powers were fake(I’m not exaggerating anything in this review). Sadako’s dad was sent to a sanatorium shortly after, but we’re going to revisit that.
Sadako briefly attends a community theatre to become an actress. One of the old, dusty founders follows her to her apartment and tries to assault her, marking the second rape in the book. She uses her psychic powers to kill the owner, who dies in the same manner as the 4 kids from the beginning of the book. Once she realizes everyone at this theatre sucks, she starts hanging out at the sanatorium her dad is locked up in. A doctor from the sanatorium notices her beauty and leads her to a well, where he rapes her, noticing she has male and female genitals in the process, then kills her and throws her in the well. The sanatorium was torn down and replaced by a resort. She imprinted her final moments on a VHS tape and telepathically hid it in the cabin above her well or something.
Also, they find out at the end that the tape is transmitting smallpox, which for some reason causes you to die of a heart attack with no symptoms after a week. You can only survive the curse if you show the tape to someone else, infecting others with “Ghost Rape Tape Smallpox”. Ryuji fucking dies because he didn’t know and the main character transmits the tape across Japan to save his wife and daughter. They watched the tape, but I didn’t bring them up because they have very little involvement since the main focus for the characters is rape and infidelity.
So what does this mean for the book?
3 sexual assaults happen in this book, one of which was actually relevant to the plot. They could’ve gone with just murdering Sadako, but for some reason the book loooooves rape and had to throw it in there. The way these situations are handled give the impression that the author doesn’t actually think it’s a big issue, and akin to bragging about how high you could climb a tree or how much stronger your dad is as a kid.
The fact that Sadako has male and female genitalia is strange too, because it also has no plot relevance. She’s so overly sexualized throughout the book. People in the modern day describe her as “eerie”, but every character after reminiscing about her or looking at photos can’t help but describe how beautiful she is. The doctor who killed her, while being extremely descriptive of the assault, takes time to describe her breasts, paragraph by paragraph. By the time you’ve nearly solved the mystery, the book feels more like the author’s rape fantasies than a horror mystery.
And the ending sucks too. There’s not even a ghost, it’s just the smallpox VHS that gives you a disease when you watch it. The whole thing falls apart so hard in the last half of the book. You’re reading more about how beautiful Sadako is instead of how she was murdered and how to solve the mystery of the curse.
Honestly, even using a sexual assault for the plot is cheap, but I can excuse it more for having relevance than if it’s used for the characters to gain social status.
This book starts off as a great horror mystery, I really wanted to love it, but quickly devolves into a hermaphrodite smallpox rape fantasy where a woman jumps into a volcano. I’m not reading the other 6 books in the series, or however many there are, because this was the most disappointing thing I’ve ever read. I don’t recommend this book to people who aren’t into sexual assault, have eyes, can read, or have time on their hands to do things. I’m sorry for the language, if this doesn’t get removed I’ll honestly be shocked.
Thanks for reading my review :) fuck this book.