Reviews

• Having read the Ring cycle of books (Ring, Spiral, Loop & Birthday) and being a fan of the Japanese versions of the films - I was completly taken by suprise by these books, so I was not sure what to expect from Edge. It is an amazing, scary and thought provoking book from the outset. I have always enjoyed the writing of Koji Suzuki and this just makes me hungry for more. I did find the end a little predictable but the lead up to this and the clues to what was coming, I thought, were clever and brilliantly put together.

• Exhilarating.

• What is there left to say about Koji Suzuki that I haven't already said in my reviews of every other novel he's released in English? Have I not praised him enough? Is he not satisfied that he is one of the few authors working today who has the ability to make me drop what I'm doing and go immediately to their newest release despite whatever else I had meant to read next? There are so few of those authors publishing--Stephen King and Clive Barker the only other two on that list--that it's quite an honor, when you consider how many unread books line the library in my house. And yet Suzuki still isn't satisfied and continually looks for new ways I can lavish praise on him. Take for instance his latest US release EDGE. Labeled by the author as a novel of "quantum horror", the thing reads in equal parts like a horror novel, a nonfiction account of the history of the universe, a science fiction epic and a handbook on understanding complicated math formulas. Really, Koji Suzuki? You couldn't be satisfied with just writing another killer novel? Sigh. In this novel, Saeko Kuriyama has been hired by the director of an upcoming tv special focusing on mysterious disappearances around the world, with the first case being the Fujimura's. A year earlier, the entire family suddenly vanished from their house. Glasses were left half full, bathwater still in the tub, it was as if the parents and their two children just vanished into thin air. Saeko had written a very well-researched and informed article on the family and it's her expertise on not only this particular case, but her skill as a writer as well, that gets her this job. But it's not all just hard work and dedication: Saeko's got some experience with the subject matter. Fifteen years earlier, her father vanished. She spent a considerable amount of money searching for him, but no trace was ever found. As the crew delves into the mystery of the missing Fujimura's, they learn of more cases of people disappearing mysteriously in the area. Through research and a tad bit of luck, they discover all the disappearances are connected by having occurred on local fault lines during periods of extreme sunspot activity. What do fault lines and sunspots have to do with missing people? About the same thing missing people have to do with the fact that the value of pi is no longer what is once was. A standard computer program, one regularly used to test new computers, discovers a pattern in the value of pi, a pattern where before none had existed, and the implications don't bode well for the structure of the universe. As the basic laws of mathematics begin to crumble, Saeko and her director Hashiba unearth more and more clues that, before night's end, it's not just going to be a few random people in the area who are missing, but that it's very likely reality itself is changing. In order to discover what's happening, hopefully in time to save herself, Saeko must go back to the day her father disappeared and learn what really happened to him. This is what I love about Suzuki's work. It's not enough that there's a cursed videotape, but he somehow figures out a way to explain in very plausible terms how it was created and how it then goes on to become a cancer wherein the movie made from the book written about the videotape also has the power to kill, this time on a much larger scale. And he makes it work. In his first novel PARADISE, he writes about two prehistoric lovers who become separated and who only, thousands of years later, are reunited through their genetic descendents, and he makes it work. And he makes it one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever read. Now he's writing about the deterioration of MATH. Math doesn't change. Two and two is FOUR, period. But the way Suzuki writes about it, the way he explains it, and the way he somehow integrates the study of math into a lecture on the history of the development of the EYE and how without vision there would be no language, he makes it work. EDGE was not an easy novel to read. Suzuki laid it on pretty thick with the science, sometimes to the detriment of the plot--or so it seemed--but in the end was able to tie everything together so you realize that, yes, that earlier bit about Saeko's father's musings on mathematics and the universe and brain development and ancient ruins, it all mattered. Every single word of it. And it's novels like this, and writers like Koji Suzuki, that remind me just how uneducated I really am. How simple. How dumb. How complacent. One of my problems with Suzuki has been his reliance on coincidence, or the way his characters have of simply jumping to the right conclusion when it serves the purpose of the plot. It was a problem I had with SPIRAL and it also appears in EDGE. I wish I could fault the novel or the author for it, too, but in the end he just turns in such a good book that I can't hold things like that against him. In fact, I hate to admit I think it's actually kind of brave of him. In cases like those, I think if I were writing it I'd have labored and worried and stressed over how to get this same information across to the characters and make it seem completely natural and unnoticeable, but Suzuki has no problem just giving the information to his characters in an albeit roundabout way, but still much more straightforward than I would have had the guts to do. And, once again, he makes it work. I don't detect a lot of range in his characters, they all seem to be standard Japanese clichés. There's the successful businessman, the professional woman, with everyone else serving to exist only as periphery characters in this drama the two main stars have playing out. Personally, however, I feel this reliance on such stock characters has more to do with Suzuki's own life and the world he is used to, and less with any lack of imagination on his part. We write the characters we know. One look at some of the plots he's come up with--you can't read a book like LOOP and say he doesn't have a very vivid imagination. The thing I think I most admire about Suzuki, and this is something clearly very very evident in EDGE, is how he doesn't go for the cheap scare. His monsters aren't hiding in the closet, they're not mysterious beasts that could be stalking you this very moment--if such things really existed. No, Suzuki seems to take great pleasure in explaining the encroaching doom found in his novels in very precise scientific terms, his efforts to say this isn't a monster in the dark, this is the real physical world and it's out to harm you. It doesn't matter if you don't believe in boogeymen, you believe in the physical laws of the universe and reality and THOSE are things out to get you. Under Suzuki's expert guidance I fully believe the danger in EDGE is a very real danger and will happen. Hopefully not as soon as he predicts in this book, but I'd certainly put a lot more stock in THIS novel coming to fruition than I would that there's an ancient shape shifting killer of children hiding in the sewers of a small town. And that's where the "quantum" part of the author's own label for his novel comes in. This isn't science fiction, it's science horror, a terrible danger is approaching, but it's a danger that comes from the real laws of reality. Every single time I think Suzuki has reached the heights of his imagination, that I think he's told the strongest horror story he possible could, he somehow finds a way to say to me oh you thought THAT was horror? No, no, THIS is horror. And he makes it work.

• Bei Koji Suzuki ist es so, dass man ihn lieben oder - ich möchte nicht "hassen" sagen - mit völligem Unverständnis betrachten muss. Das war schon bei den "Ring"-Büchern so: schon diese Serie zeichnete sich durch sehr untergründigen, eher psychologischen Horror aus (der mit der reißerischen, amerikanischen Verfilmung nun wirklich nichts zu tun hat!). Koji Suzuki mag nicht sehr wissenschaftlich sein, und wild vor sich hin fabulieren. Aber: er schafft es, sich ganz in ein Thema hineinzuversetzen, und dem Leser eine Idee einzupflanzen. Es ist die sehr simple Frage "Was wäre, wenn ...?", die in Suzukis Büchern den Horror ausmacht. Ein Buch wie "Edge" lässt sich beinahe unmöglich zusammenfassen oder nacherzählen. Denn sonst würde man dem Leser Entscheidendes vorwegnehmen. Ich möchte daher den Inhalt nur grob umreißen. Es beginnt mit einem Prolog voller rätselhafter Geschehnisse: mehrere Touristen verschwinden spurlos in der amerikanischen Wüste. Ein Weltraumteleskop verzeichnet das plötzliche und vollständige Erlöschen mehrerer Sterne. Und weltweit stürzen Supercomputer ab, die den Wert der Zahl "Pi" berechnen sollen... Im Hauptteil haben wir es dann im Wesentlichen mit zwei Personen zu tun: der Journalistin Saeko, und dem Fernseh-Journalisten Hashiba. Beide geraten durch Zufall an die Erforschung derselben Geschichte: mysteriöse Fälle von spurlosem Verschwinden, sogenannte "missing persons". Saekos eigener Vater verschwand vor 18 Jahren spurlos, was der Geschichte besondere Würze verleiht. Saeko und Hashiba verhalten sich eigentlich wie Detektive. Sie sammeln immer mehr Hinweise und Hintergründe. (Insofern ist "Edge" mit "Ring" vergleichbar.) Dabei "passiert" eigentlich über weite Strecken nichts, was man dem Buch sicher zum Vorwurf machen kann. Aber: wenn man sich auf diese sehr hintergründige Erzählweise einlässt, dann entfaltet sich die Handlung im eigenen Kopf, und lässt eisige Schauer den Rücken herabrieseln... Man merkt durchaus, dass der Autor Jahre für die Recherche zu diesem Buch gebraucht hat: es werden alle möglichen wissenschaftlichen Themen angerissen. Geographie, Anthropologie, Frühgeschichte, das Aussterben der Dinosaurier, Entstehung der Arten, Zahlentheorie (scheinbar ein besonderes Steckenpferd des Autors!), theoretische Physik... und irgendwie scheint alles mit dem ursprünglichen Fall zu tun zu haben... Ein klein wenig hat mich das Buch diesmal auch an alte Hitchcock-Filme erinnert. Denn die Dinge, die passieren, sind alle für sich genommen merkwürdig, aber kein Horror. Doch in der Gesamtschau beginnt man sich zu gruseln, was das Zeug hält...! Zuerst sind es Erdbeben. Dann Tiere, die sich merkwürdig verhalten, wie Möwen im Inland. Dann Lichterscheinungen. Und dann ... nein, das verrate ich nicht! Es steigert sich alles doch irgendwie, nur halt sehr, sehr langsam. Bis schließlich Saeko und Hashiba, beide getrennt voneinander, vor eine schreckliche Entscheidung gestellt werden. Wer jetzt die Stirne runzelt, den kann ich verstehen! Das alles ist wirklich in keine einzige mir bekannte Schublade einzuordnen. Mich aber hat das Buch völlig fasziniert. Immer häppchenweise bekam ich wissenschaftliche Theorien serviert, und musste mir ganz grundsätzliche Fragen stellen. Was ist eigentlich Erkenntnis? Woher wissen wir, was wir wissen? Wie fest sind die Grundlagen unserer Wahrnehmung, ja, unseres Universums eigentlich? Und wie hätte ich mich in Saekos oder Hashibas Lage verhalten? Diese Fragen lassen mich einfach nicht los. Ich habe schon mit diversen Freunden diskutiert, und komme einfach zu keinem Ergebnis. Und genau das macht für mich ein gutes Buch aus: dass es Gedanken anstößt. Sicher ist "Edge" aus wissenschaftlicher Sicht anfechtbar. Aber einem Wissenschaftler würde ich es eh nicht empfehlen! Sehr wohl aber einem Leser, der Lust auf etwas völlig Neues hat, das ihn noch lange beschäftigt.

• GOOD BOOK!

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