Ring

Ring is a horror novel by the Japanese writer Koji Suzuki; it first appeared in 1991 and takes place in present-day Japan. It is the first book of a trilogy, continued in Spiral (1995) and Loop (1998), and it began the wider Ring series that later spread into film and television.

The story follows Kazuyuki Asakawa, a reporter for the Daily News, after his niece and three other teenagers die on the same night in the same inexplicable way. Asakawa takes up a private investigation and traces the four young people to a holiday resort, Hakone Pacific Land, where they had been a week before their deaths.

At the resort he finds an unmarked videotape, and watching it leaves him warned that he has only a week left to live. The stretch of tape that is meant to explain how to escape that fate has been recorded over, so he cannot simply follow instructions and has to work out what the recording wants from the people who survive it.

The novel sets the shape the sequels and the film adaptations follow: it presents the tape as a puzzle to be solved under a deadline rather than a monster to be fought, and it lets the reader's own curiosity become part of the trap. Suzuki wrote it as much as a mystery as a ghost story.