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May 3, 2024 06:11
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- FactsAreUseless
- Feb 16, 2011
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It's been a while, and I can't remember the book, but it was the guy who was featured on Oprah's Book Club and was later found to have fabricated 95% of his life. The entire thing reeks of stdh.txt yet for some reason it was a big deal for a year or so
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Jul 17, 2015 14:32
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- FactsAreUseless
- Feb 16, 2011
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The "unreliable author" theory needs a lot more play in critical studies.
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Jul 19, 2015 13:46
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- FactsAreUseless
- Feb 16, 2011
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Basically, if instead of a yankee it were a guy with the ultra-specific skills to build working plumbing, piezoelectric radios, and submachine guns. It has its' moments, but everyone but the main character spends most of their time looking like drooling idiots.
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Dec 3, 2015 12:20
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- FactsAreUseless
- Feb 16, 2011
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There are less erotic words than "knickers," but not many.
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Dec 12, 2015 18:29
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May 3, 2024 06:11
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- FactsAreUseless
- Feb 16, 2011
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I don't know if they're really bad, but they are certainly entertainingly batshit insane: The Ring trilogy, Ring, Spiral and Loop by Koji Suzuki, that the Horror movie Ringu was based on. Well it was based on the first book, it kinda ignored the other two. This is completely psychotic but I had so much fun reading it, I honestly recommend going in blind, but for the curious:
Ring reads innocently enough - horror novel about people who die after watching a haunted video tape. OK, much like the movie so far. Main character finds the bones, attempts to lay Sadako to rest and fails, just like the movie. However the first signs of oddity come at the end of this book - Sadako is a partial hermaphrodite as well as a vengeance ghost, and she was raped just before her death by a smallpox victim just before she dies - that was who put her in the well. So she projects her anger towards the videotape and kills whoever watches it unless they copy and show it - fine.
MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR THE BATSHIT TRILOGY AHOY!
However, then Spiral happens - new revelations:
Sadako is not only the fury at her own death, she has also joined with the smallpox virus, which is itself angry that modern medicine killed it by rendering it powerless. The reason for the videotape is revealed - she the reason everyone who watches the tape dies is because they get infected upon viewing by a variation of smallpox called the Ring Virus. Sadako is no longer thinking like Sadako - she only wants to reproduce, as that is all a virus wants to do. However the virus turns into two strains - the unbroken ring, which kills the victim if not copied, and the Broken Ring, which is compared to a sperm cell.
This comparison is important - anyone infected with this version is made to reproduce it another way - one of the main characters is a journalist with good writing skills - Sadako makes him, through the virus's influence, write a manuscript that describes the tape so intensely, impossibly accurately that anyone who reads it gets the same effect. However if a woman who watches the tape/reads the manuscript happens to be ovulating when they watch it Sadako basically impregnates them with her genetic information. Sadako, in this book, does this once. The secondary main character of the first book, Ryuji, is discovered dead by his assistant, who reads the manuscript while there. She later gives birth to Sadako, after Sadako takes over her mind and throws her down a shaft (she wants to be reborn in the same circumstances in which she died, to overcome the obstacle that killed her). After her birth, Sadako rapidly reaches the age at which she dies, but the main character of the second book fails to recognise her at first, because she looks slightly different. This is explained by the idea that noone, unless looking in a mirror, knows exactly what their own face looks like so some details are filled in by the brain in the minds eye - the face she ends up with is the face that she pictured herself with.
The book ends with the main character being confronted on the beach by Reborn Sadako and formerly deceased Ryuji - when reborn Sadako was born as a complete hermaphrodite so on top of everything else she can impregnate herself now. Ryuji is back because Sadako made a deal with him post-mortem - if he helped her she would help him return to the world of the living by taking his genetic information from his remains and literally birthing him anew. She makes the same offer to the main character - Allow her manuscript to be published and read by millions, while she also has a plan in the works to make her way into other media - she will make a videogame, movie, website, every type of media will spread her virus worldwide, allowing her to take over the world. He agrees as she offers to give him back his dead son in the same way Ryuji was reborn,
THINGS GET CRAZIER! STRAP IN!
In Loop it is hard to tell at first how it fits in - The main mystery is a simulation of the beginning of life that was created on a supercomputer to solve the problem of 'how we got here' - however the project failed as the life simulated became cancerous, all life, animal or vegetable became one type of organism and the simulation just stopped. Also a viral form of Cancer called the Metastating Human Cancer Virus started spreading with disastrous results. While searching for zones where the virus failed to take hold the main character learns the following:
The Simulation virus was caused by three virtual entities - Sadako Yamamura, Ryuji and the main character from the second book. The first two books only took place in a simulated reality. However, as Ryuji died, but before Sadako made her pact with him, he noticed that he was being watched by something 'outside' and called out for help to 'get out'. The head scientist at the time obliged, and found a way via absolute nonsense relating to genetics, and converting binary code to amino acids. Ryuji was reborn and grew up outside the sim- to become the main character of the third book. Ryuji vows to stop the cancer virus, wshich escaped because he was a carrier of the Ring virus, by stopping Sadako before his world can b destroyed utterly - so he is put back into the simulation, reversing the process only to be given birth to by - Sadako Yamamura - he has overwritten the version of himself that made the vow witrh Sadako, so now instead of helping her, he ends the series joining with the MC of the second book to stop her. The world may yet be saved.
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Jun 2, 2016 00:10
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Jul 3, 2015 15:31
