RS: Welcome to this month’s bonus episode of Rite Gud. For this edition of the Book Club, we’re talking about Koji Suzuki’s 1991 novel, Ring, or Ringu, if you prefer. Joining us is Langdon of Death Sentence. You’re back, and it sounds like you’re vacuuming?

Langdon: I’m, well, no? Well, I’m not vacuuming, so I don’t know where that sound’s coming from.

RS: I don’t know where that [00:01:00] sound’s coming from. Okay,

Langdon: That’s good.

RS: be gone now. So when I said I wanted to do Ringu, you jumped on it, you got very excited, you’re like, Fuck yeah! Because this is a book that’s compelling, this is a book I read many, many years ago in college, and occasionally I’ll just, it’ll just pop into my head again, and just be like, “Sadako’s smallpox!” Like, what, what, what?

Langdon: I

RS: an intrusive thought, it’ll just come up in there. This book has spawned so many spin offs and sequels and adaptations. It’s made this massive franchise, and it’s really, really compelling. What is it about this book that has such a hold on people, do you think?

Langdon: I think for, speaking mostly people in the West, because obviously neither of us are Japanese, um,

RS: is Japanese.

Langdon: Like we all find out about it pretty much from the what was it a 90 98 that the american film came out 99 something like it’s late. Um And honest to god one of the best horror films of the 90s, legitimately [00:02:00] a fucking brilliant film um, and so for a while most people I think just think of it as You know a movie if you’re deep enough into either the science fiction slash horror um, like readership world or just I got the cool kind of autism, where if I go to a record shop or a bookstore, I will look at every book on the shelf.

Everyone. Um, which is normal. That’s how normal people, that’s normal to do that. It’s, I’m normal,

RS: Everyone does

Langdon: Yes. Uh, go

RS: you? Don’t you, listeners? If you don’t do this, listeners, you’re the weird one, and you should be embarrassed.

Langdon: Go to a record shop and I would literally look at… and this was even as far back as when I was like seven or eight. I would look at every single album in the entire store to figure out the ones I wanted to buy. But, it turns out that helps you know a lot about books and music to, you know, have a sociopathic level of autism.

At some point, these got [00:03:00] translated by, um, Kodakawa, I think, are the people who did the English, translation. Who uh, solicited the English translations of them. But, had a really catching cover. That all the English editions have. And it’s one of those things where I think, I first ran into these books because I saw it in a bookstore and I was like, “Huh, that’s weird.

They stole that name from the movie.” and you pick up the book and you look at it, And you go, “wait, wait.” Cause it’s not the kind of movie that makes you think this was a novel first. There’s nothing about it that feels, converted from a novel. Where if you’ve seen enough movies, you kind of start to get a sense of like, Oh, this probably is an adaptation.

Cause of just slight weirdnesses in how things move. That feel more like, okay, that was a book that you had to turn into a movie. Me, you, and pretty much everyone else who ran into this book shortly after it got translated. You know, you go and you read it expecting like, Oh, this is probably gonna be some, some hogwash shit.

I’m gonna laugh a little [00:04:00] bit. The movie’s gonna be way better or something. And then you read it, and it’s, it’s so fucking bizarre. Like there’s no– It’s happened for the years that I’ve tried to tell people about these books. We both saw it happen in the Discord when you mentioned, like, Hey, we’re gonna be covering The Ring.

Of

RS: worth reading the book because it’s so much weirder. It is significantly weirder.

Langdon: People who are like, Oh, I love the movie. And you go, you should read the book. The book’s fucking crazy. They go, ha ha, okay. And they just, like, they don’t… and you’re like, no, I can’t stress this enough. You really need to read it. And they go, ha, sure, yeah, ha ha. And you go, no, it’s like 200 pages, a little more than that.

They get a death grip on you because it’s like, There’s, there’s this thing I think that everyone knows within the world of horror at least, that like, J horror moves in a very different way from western horror. And a lot of that’s Because they’ve had horror stories, you know, for the entire, uh, time that their culture’s been [00:05:00] around.

So even when they adapted more Western bracketings of the narrative form, like, it’s still It’s approaching what is horrific and how does it embody horror from a very different place. So it has this really exciting energy to it. And going, like, what if the whole book was like that? And then leaning forward and being like what if the book also can’t tell if it wants to be a sci fi novel or not So it sometimes is and sometimes isn’t? And yeah, as you mentioned like especially I think it probably if i just watched the ring then watch a lot of people Um, I I assume you probably did the same thing you find out It’s an adaptation of a japanese movie before knowing it’s a book So you go watch

RS: Yeah, I watched the Japanese movie.

Langdon: And you go, oh, that’s also dope.

That’s the other thing is that all three of them feel different. They don’t feel contradictory, but they none of them are one to one adaptations of another. Which is exciting to me. I mean, I [00:06:00] think that’s actually a really cool thing about them because it feels like each director of a project when I want to make my Ring and keep all the raw DNA, but But it’s really

RS: there’s gonna be horses in mine.

Langdon: if you, if you read past this book everyone gets exponentially crazier.

To the point where if I start dropping factoids about book 2 or, my god, the 3rd one, Um, it straight up sounds like I’m lying. It’s that ver the verve of the overall… franchise feels like the wrong word, although technically that’s true because that feels a bit more Capitalistic compared to what is like what it feels like is actually going on with it Which is much more artist driven in a lot of ways.

Each work like radically recontextualizes all of the other ones to just do a completely different thing. And that kind of It amounts to this hyper, zany level of, like, encyclopedic [00:07:00] nonsense in such a dope way it’s so fucking good. Like, uh,

RS: Nice. So this book’s fucking weird. But I feel like it’s gotta, you gotta have more than just being fucking weird to, to

Langdon: Yeah.

RS: many people into it as possible. ’cause there are a lot of very weird books that do not have the hold on, on the culture of the way that this one did and, and granted, um, Koji Suzuki was a very prominent novelist and also a very interesting person who’s had a very interesting life, it sounds like, in Japan, but even then, like, why does this translate so well across the world?

Why, why has it had such a spread that it has and why does it hit so well? And I don’t think that it’s just because it’s fucking weird, but I think it really captures a kind of mood. And, and the time it came out, first of all, the time the book was written, it feels [00:08:00] so, like, a prophecy in many ways. It was written in the early 90s, and it, and then the time when the movie, at least the American movie, came out in, like, the late 90s, which is Right before social media was really big, this book, like, it feels like it captured the sense that we were all about to have our brains melted by the internet, but like, before the internet melted all of our brains, it was just like, this is what it’s gonna do to you. He somehow knew, and I mean, that this this book is all about virality in multiple ways.

Langdon: I mean,

RS: In a way that is nonsense, but it completely works somehow.

Langdon: there’s something, it makes it not surprising in a certain sense when later on, these books become straight up cyberpunk. I’m not making that up, by the way. I won’t spoil it for you all. I’m not making it up, though. They become literal cyberpunk novels. But, you look back at this one, and like you were saying, like, the notions of that are embedded in [00:09:00] it.

He clearly was reading, I mean, remembering, like, in Japanese horror and science fiction, this is right around the time that, Battle Angel Alita, and I’m trying to remember the name of, Ghost in the Shell, uh, Akira has come out. So, like, there’s a bunch of stuff sitting in the zeitgeist, especially if you are a politically active artist on the edge of the avant garde.

Not necessarily strictly deep into avant garde stuff, but especially early on, cyberpunk was sitting at a more avant garde edge. You were expected to be reading some, like, theory in order to make compelling cyberpunk because of all the references like Baudrillard and Foucault and all that kind of baked into it.

So, like, clearly he was thinking about the same kinds of stuff of, both virality and virtuality, of, like, the superimposition of things over other things. You can kind of trace it back lineage wise to anxieties in the early 20th century about like… because conformity used [00:10:00] to not be this big Terror for people because if you know, you’re part of your community and you know Maybe every now and again you get the weirdo in the 17 or 1800s who’s like “liberty! The enlightened self,” but otherwise people were like “shut up nerd.

Go farm.” but then somewhere around the rise of real bodies of socialism and then parallel to it fascism and then the rise of sort of the modern shape of capitalism, all three of them, at least to people outside of them, present this image of conformity as the thing that crushes and annihilates the self.

And in order to do that, you kind of have to overlay the image of the ideal self over the real self and flatten the real for the ideal. This shows up in all kinds of like Anything that’s punk adjacent. For better and for worse. Cause there are some weirdnesses around that where like, especially I think a lot of us get to adulthood and go, No, there’s a degree of hating conformity where you’re [00:11:00] deliberately alienating yourself from all your friends and peers, and that’s not very good.

Like, actually my life’s worse from that. Clearly he was like, thinking about a lot of this stuff. But, yeah, encodes it in this like, There’s something ingenious about it, right? Looking back it feels a little bit quaint that he uses, VHSs but I think people who weren’t alive in the 80s and early 90s forget that like VHSs were, for a while, insanely expensive.

Like insanely expensive. It would be like 500 for a VHS player in the mid 80s. And like 500 in mid 80s dollars, so it’s like you’re paying– Imagine buying four ps5s in order to watch a VHS of like Murder She Wrote episodes. So like it did have this sort of science fictional edge, but then His his notion of the virus is this weird combination of like… there’s the technological metaphor of the replication of videotapes, which everyone [00:12:00] kind of knows, even from the movie, and how he, he hints at, and makes far more explicit in later books than this, that that’s a virus replicating itself, that that’s its taking its DNA.

Actually, no, he does first say that in this book, that it’s a, a digitalized encoding of a kind of DNA. But, in the book version, he has this absolutely batshit fucking crazy origin of that notion of Sadako and her mom are kinda, sorta, real psychics? That, like, embed their consciousness can embed their consciousness in photogra photographs that they can also witness from a distance?

As a dying act, Sadako embeds herself using that into, into a VHS, because what is a VHS but thousands of photographs? So she can exponentiate her consciousness. You’re like, what the fuck? Yeah,

RS: but [00:13:00] Smallpox.

They make a tie at the end where they say that she functionally is a reborn version of Smallpox.

RS: Because she had the last case of Smallpox in Japan. And as she was dying, the Smallpox virus was dying inside of her. And they kind of mixed together, to carry on their existence together.

Langdon: It’s this really ingenious thing that like, I think a lot of, as much as we can talk about how there’s a lot of instances of bad horror, bad fantasy, kind of leaning way too heavily on a didactic wing of allegory,

RS: Yeah.

Langdon: I think, I think that has to be said more not to dissuade people from either didacticism or allegory because horror requires you to be horrified by something and most of the horror isn’t like, “Oh, that’s nasty because that’s, that’s being grossed out.”

That’s not horrified. Most horror is more like a moral revulsion. Like you see something that’s reprehensible and you find that [00:14:00] horrific. He invokes the smallpox thing in the same, like he mentions offhandedly things like America’s usage of smallpox against communities of color and it’s used as a bioweapon as like this embodiment of social cruelty that gets passed on because yeah in the book, they omit from every fucking film version Sadako is also, Sadako is intersex, and shockingly for a book that came out in 1991, it states that Sadako is a woman and never misgenders her, but has other people commit violence against her, both physical and implied sexual violence as well, based on this.

The level of her rage becomes a bit more Totally understandable in terms of like the volume of it compared to the film where it’s just like “Girl in well,” I granted i’d be i’d be pissed if I

RS: I would also be upset about being a girl in a well.

Langdon: Yeah, i’m [00:15:00] I you know not not to diminish that one i’d be pretty bad Girls don’t belong in wells.

That’s you can quote me on that

RS: I think that, that the fact that it’s, that it’s, That it’s a rape, too, is missing from both of the film adaptations, that she gets smallpox by being raped by a doctor who has a mild case of smallpox.

Langdon: That doctor is, if I remember correctly, he’s like, kinda sorta a father figure as well, And he’s exploiting her and her mother for their psychic abilities,

RS: No, that’s a different

Langdon: that’s a different doctor,

RS: That’s her, her, her father figure, the, the professor, like, the psychic researcher guy, is exploiting her and her mother. But that’s the guy who’s dying in the hospital, and while she’s visiting him in the sanitarium or whatever, this other doctor, who works at the sanitarium, who she’s been hanging out with, he, Goes on a walk with her, leads her into the woods, and, and violates her, and kills, and throws her in a well.

Langdon: If, if, if, if when you’re [00:16:00] hearing this, you’re thinking, God, those guys sound pretty terrible. We’ll get there. Don’t worry.

RS: Yeah.

Langdon: these episodes have outlines. Don’t worry, we’ll get there.

RS: yeah, eventually.

Langdon: It, it’s, it’s this really intriguing. Set, uh, because it’s also structured more like a detective novel than like a horror novel most of the time, which is, I think, an interesting tonal shift, if you’re not, one, if you’re not

RS: it’s a bit like a noir.

Langdon: Yeah.

RS: It’s a lot like a noir. I’m thinking of that, that Otto Preminger film, where most of the story, most of the film is, The beginning, I think, starts with them getting news that she’s died in a car accident, and they’re all telling their stories , and it kind of takes that tone, that structure of here’s a lot of people.

I mean, we get this videotape, we figure out that It’s by someone named Sadako Yamamura. And now we try and figure out who was Sadako Yamamura, why did she create this tape, and we’re getting stories about her and her family from these outside [00:17:00] perspectives. And nearly every outside perspective is from someone who was hostile.

I mean, one of the people who knew her when she was a young woman was another member of this theater troupe. She was trying to be an actress, but it just didn’t quite work out. And, I mean, the other member of the theater troupe who knew her just only said, like, “Uh, she was weird and gross,” you know.

Langdon: I forget whether it’s in this book or in a later one, it’s implied as well that she was sexually taken

RS: Yes, some creepy guy from the theater group paid her a visit, and the next thing that happened is he showed up the next day at the, at the company and just fell down and fucking died. Just dropped dead, so it’s like, okay, you, you, you deserve that, fucker. He did something real bad, or at least tried to do something real bad, and then he just collapsed and fucking died.

Mm.

Langdon: something that I think is really interesting about the structure of this book is we get, unlike in a lot of the film versions, I think it does actually show up [00:18:00] in the initial TV film version of The Ring that predated Ringu. But we get a brief, I think two chapters of the first people who watched the video, or not the first, the people who watched the video immediately before Ringu.

the main character and it It’s funny because on one hand it does the pretty standard horror trope of a bunch of

RS: Yeah, the opening kill, especially if it’s a teen girl. It’s a teen girl minding her own business, and then, ah, dead.

Langdon: But it’s funny because like in this case, again testament to the fact that koji suzuki Similar to Wes Craven when he was at his peak is clearly thinking very consciously about how he’s structuring it Because. At first you’re going, oh, it’s a stereotypical opening. Oh, it’s just teens or whatever, but then it becomes pressingly dark and cruel that of all people that we get direct depictions of the death of it is [00:19:00] itself A young girl who almost got taken advantage of by her boyfriend in a distant place Doing absolutely nothing and just being presented this tape. There are these echoes of Sadako’s base trauma, or at least most, most eruptive trauma.

I mean, definitely not the base one now that I think about it, but that are repeated by Sadako, which is this, a really potent image that, it’s, it’s interesting because it fits both the noir archetype of fucked up people fucking up other people, Some, some of whom are fucked up and some of whom aren’t yet.

As well as the more This is also where I uh pooh pooh the people who are like, “I don’t like the whole elevated horror thing Horror doesn’t always have to be about trauma.” Well, I don’t know what you thought horror was about prior to these things Um, because it sounds like you’re illiterate because horror is largely almost always about trauma. I’m, not sure if people know this but getting murdered by [00:20:00] monsters is traumatic. And normally we’re scared of that because it would be really bad.

RS: Elevated horror is when they talk about it in therapy, which I prefer the kind where they don’t.

Langdon: The root function though of like, we’re talking about, because that’s another thing that sort of provokes horror is not only a primal pain, but a primal pain that we will subconsciously begin inflicting on, on others, uh, wittingly or not. And having Sadako act, live that out, where it’s like, Whenever we get evidence of her, even when we’re being presented, It’s funny because even when we’re being presented testimony of her life from people who hate her or view her with suspicion or things like that, They can’t help but half confess their own cruelty.

They’ll, like, try to justify it, but then they’re like, ” Yeah, I, I, I hid the fact that my, my co worker, uh, my co worker raped her, But you have to realize, she was weird.”

RS: Yeah.

Langdon: That it’s then of all things to have that person, [00:21:00] carry out mirrors of her own pain to people who don’t deserve it.

There are many people that she doesn’t do who do. When the one, uh, rapist, uh, Doctor just kind of dies for no clear reason. I don’t think there’s a reader in the world who’s like, “oh No,” you’re like, well, I mean Yep. Yeah, you played with fire buddy. But it’s just it’s a really interesting way to make that specific opening scene, especially if you reread it sting in a really specific way and him deliberately picking something where you’re not gonna pick it up as you’re

RS: Wait, I don’t believe the rapist doctor dies.

Langdon: Oh, I, oh, I thought, I thought

RS: There was the theater, the guy who just dropped dead was the theater guy, right?

Langdon: Uh,

RS: theater guy. But I think, I believe the doctor, all that happens is that like, Ryuji just tweaks his nose like a 1950s greaser. And says like, “hey, fuck you buddy,” and then they just leave.

Langdon: I had forgotten that part. That’s way funnier in a, a bleak does nothing [00:22:00] kind of way.

RS: Because there’s a whole description, there’s a whole discussion that they have is like, well, why didn’t she kill the doctor? If she has this power, why wouldn’t she kill her rapist? Why wouldn’t she kill him? And it’s like, well, hmm, I don’t know,

Langdon: That’s a good question. Hmm. That’s sort of.

RS: Yeah, they puzzled it out. Well, Ryuji comes to a conclusion, which is that she didn’t will him to rape her, but she did will him to kill her because she was just fucking done. And she wanted to be killed in a way that would like, allow her to create this immortality. But this is coming from Ryuji, though.

Langdon: And it’s,

RS: take that with a grain of salt because it’s Ryuji

Langdon: Yeah, so I think at this point it’s worth us maybe mentioning that the two main characters who are different

RS: terrible

Langdon: insane

RS: Asakawa is a very bland character. He’s just kind of there, but, but despite his blandness, he manages to be a terrible husband and father. And then his friend [00:23:00] Ryuji is, like I mentioned before, that this book is somehow the internet before the internet exists. Ryuji is like Reddit. Like if Reddit gave birth to one of those Tibetan thought forms, like a, like a, oh god, what do you, what do you call it?

A tulpa, yeah. He’s like a tulpa made out of Reddit, in that he’s very knowledgeable and very useful, and also the creepiest motherfucker on earth. Just, yeah. A horrible weird little man who is introduced by telling Asakawa about a time that he raped a girl using psychic powers or something. He has the worst vibes. Asakawa’s wife is just like, “please don’t bring that fucking guy into our house, like, ever.

Just please don’t fucking bring that guy into our house.” All he can say is, yeah,

Langdon: At one point he kind of thinks to himself I’m glad I never brought up that Ryuji raped someone to my wife because she’d be really mad about that and then just sort Of moves on and you’re like what? What,

RS: Yeah, and this whole [00:24:00] book, you’re like, what the fuck?

Langdon: Asakawa is a speci– in a certain way Asakawa is worse in ways than Ryuji ’cause Ryuji gives off ” sociopath, I’m gonna wear your skin” vibes, all the time. That’s bad, but there’s, we’ve gotten a lot of like social discourse about this. The kind of person who signals very clearly, I’m an evil, insane piece of shit.

That sucks, but that’s easier to avoid. Asakawa is like Martin Luther King Jr’s white liberal, but like on steroids in that he just passively acknowledges, but just continues to allow incredibly horrible things to happen because he can’t be moved to give a shit about anything. He serves in a lot of ways as almost like another, the way that noir

really fucking hates detectives. It’s really funny that in certain neo noir people kind of think of them as like “Oh these cool suave characters” and then you watch a classic noir and you go. I think they hate everyone on the screen[00:25:00]

RS: yeah, this guy’s a piece of shit.

Langdon: Because it’s like Asakawa only cares about detective stuff. That’s it.

He’s a journalist. But he only cares about journalism. He it seemingly doesn’t give a shit about his wife or his kid. Like it every now and again, he’ll go. Oh shit. Yeah, I have a baby. Oh, whatever. I keep going

RS: he, he, he goes out to help for his, for this colleague, only when it becomes obvious that he’ll literally die without his help. The whole time he’s just thinking like, well, he might, he might get the scoop. Yeah. I don’t want him to get the scoop before me. Like, literally, this is a haunted videotape that killed four people.

Can you maybe think a little bit about more than getting the right scoop? And he’s like, I guess if I die, I won’t be able to get my head, my name on the byline.

Langdon: and it’s it’s funny because He learns about the tape because he happens to go on vacation sees the tape I don’t I think you watch it’s [00:26:00] like a bit of it and then immediately turns it off and it’s like that’s fucking weird and he mentions it to Ryuji who later goes and I Isn’t it that he goes up alone and watches it himself and is like, haha.

I’m gonna die now. Um,

RS: no, no. In the book, what’s, what’s happening is he hears about it. He hears about the, the death of, like, one of the four kids because a taxi driver witnessed it.

Langdon: Yeah

RS: And he hears about it from the cab driver and he goes and investigates and finds out, like, wow, all these, these four kids who were young and healthy all died of a heart attack at the exact same time.

Finds out that they all took a vacation together at this one place, this one little cabin, and he thinks, like, maybe it was some kind of virus, so he goes out there and while he’s there, he watches this videotape. And he watches the whole thing, but the bit, the bit at the end where it says, like, “the only way to save yourself is…” the bit is taped over, as a little prank, because the teenagers were being little assholes.

Langdon: and so most most of the book [00:27:00] is him trying to figure out like what did I see and then later How do I what how do I not die? Um,

RS: what’s the charm? How do I fix this?

Langdon: And so Ryuji winds up Also like Ryuji watches it too just sort of like I forget exactly why he does it, but he’s just sort of like, Ha ha, now we’re both gonna die, so we both have to solve this mystery.

Unless, you’re like, you’re a

RS: doesn’t give a fuck.

Langdon: person! This is where we get some of the stuff that’s like Two facts about Ryuji that condemn Asakawa substantially more than Ryuji. So, early in the book, Ryuji confesses to him like, I raped a person, as we’d mentioned, and Asakawa’s like, I hate this guy, he’s so weird and creepy, but I can’t just let him get away or whatever.

He tells himself all this stuff, and it’s only near the very end of the book that Ryuji says explicitly to him, I never actually did any of that, and it gets revealed that he’s functionally [00:28:00] asexual from, like, his

RS: No, that, he, Ryuji doesn’t reveal that.

It’s his girlfriend.

Langdon: Oh yeah, sorry, that’s what it was, it was, uh,

RS: It’s after Ryuji dies, uh, Asakawa goes to his house or something and his girlfriend’s there and she says, “Let me clear the air about what you think our relationship was. He, he was actually very innocent and I don’t know if he’d ever even been with a woman at all.”

Langdon: And then there’s this bit where, he lied about committing a rape because he knew that Asakawa craved someone else living out the bleak reality. almost sociopathic thrill that Asakawa feels is lacking from his life, and it’s the same, it’s clearly the same thing that drives him to be a journalist, is precisely the, and again, this functionally feels like a critique of um, social media before social media, granted this is like tabloids and like yellow journalism and all that going back, way way way back, of like, my bland life causes me to crave witnessing a kind of [00:29:00] primal violence being enacted because that makes me feel alive in a way that I Just don’t feel alive in my day to day life. And so I will feign disgust at this stuff, but I will never ever look away I will never try to stop any of this stuff.

I just want to feel this like moral indignation as a mask to a perpetual witness of of violence Like horrible violence. And Ryuji just calling him on his shit being like, “you like this. i’m pretending. You like this though.”

RS: And Ryuji this whole time is kind of portrayed as just stronger in every way. He’s better at the detective work. He’s physically stronger than Asakawa. Asakawa, as much as he hates him, also really does admire him in a lot of ways. He’s, and has admired him ever since they were schoolmates because he was this very athletic guy or something that Asakawa kind of thought was cool when he was a kid.

He was like gymcel or something, I [00:30:00] guess.

Langdon: I really like how the book never draws direct attention to the fact that If there is a male character and they are not literally just a passerby They are HUGE piece of garbage.

RS: Except for the one fisherman. There’s a bit where Sadako’s mother has a vision and dredges like a possibly cursed religious statue out of the sea. The fisherman who gives her a ride out to the ocean, he seems okay. He seems like an okay guy. He’s got a major crush on her, he doesn’t take advantage, he averts his eyes respectfully, even though he is, is very, very attracted to this girl.

He seems okay.

Langdon: And it’s like,

RS: if she’d married him, things would have been fine. He just seems like the kind of solid, dependable, Samwise Gamgee type husband who is like a very good partner to the crazy goth woman.

Langdon: it becomes this [00:31:00] cutting analogy. So we see a lot of things from, Not just people beholden to second wave feminism, but a pretty common thing of people who have very real and very, like, totally fucking understandable trauma regarding men that then becomes a sort of pathological thing, that the, the realistic traumatic response of, like, this, this thing gave me pain when, at some time gets mapped onto this universalist thing of like, they can’t help but inflict pain.

There’s this animalistic thing that winds up, in a lot of ways, one of the chief critiques of that mode of thought is it cheapens a lot of the actual critique of that kind of violence. Because if you make it pathological, then it’s, it’s like getting mad at a cat for eating meat. Like, if it’s an obligate carnivore, it’s almost like not its fault in a certain way.

And the inclusion, it’s this, this smart, very economical in its narrative, by having just this one person [00:32:00] who’s legitimately a sincere and considerate person, makes all of the other dudes being horrible pieces of shit, Really sting because they’re like, oh these are bad people. This is not the cynical thing that people are bad. This is like there are bad people. And it’s worse that not everyone’s bad. If everyone was bad You could just be a prick all the time. Then Sadako would be kind of right and kind of like ruthlessly killing kind of anyone. But Allowing that complication which is something that a lot of horror that dives into stuff that’s this relatively dark can lean on, I think, the trite and easy, overly cynical position.

Which, again, it oversimplifies stuff to the point where it’s like, okay, now it’s not really horror anymore. In a certain way, I Spit on Your Grave almost isn’t a horror film, especially most, modern feminist reads of it, because it’s like, yeah, these guys, sexually violate a woman and then she murders all of them.

That’s just dope. Like that’s dope. She kills a bunch of horrible people. Versus in this where you’re like, I [00:33:00] feel bad I feel bad almost every page like

RS: and that Sadako’s violence isn’t focused in a way that’s fair or just, it just radiates out to anyone who’s kind of within reach, anyone who’s vulnerable. Well, that’s how it fucking goes, man.

Langdon: Yeah, and

RS: That’s just real.

Langdon: it That’s the thing that makes it sting more is that sense of it because that’s the other thing that

RS: Cause she’s absolutely right to be angry at the world. The world treated her and her mom so bad. God. All she’s ever known is this, like, misery and cruelty and suffering. Just, everyone’s just been shitty to her and her mom her entire fucking life. Just for, like, just for existing, not even for, doing anything wrong.

It’s just, well, she’s weird. Like, you know, okay.

Langdon: I mean, it’s,

RS: so fucking what?

Langdon: it’s a

RS: “She’s weird, but also she’s hot, which makes me madder.” All

Langdon: sexy and I want to have sex with her and that makes me feel weird. You’re like, why? Just be attracted to her. Why is that, why are you so fucking bizarre? It touches on the thing that I think a lot of people in [00:34:00] certain, The more liberal wing of even leftist space tend to be wary of, which is a kind of, Obligate sympathy, to certain figures like the school shooter or the incel or things like that.

Not so much that you think, when they reach that point, now I’m sympathetic to them because that, that, that is weird. But more that, people like that don’t emerge from nothing. They aren’t like born ontologically evil and then it’s just a matter of time. Especially if you hold to like a materialist like, I I don’t believe in weird supernatural shit So I don’t think that a weird ghost inhabits their brain. Things happen in their life that lead them there which means that other things could have happened that wouldn’t have led them there. So there’s always a kind of tragedy, even if it’s not a personal tragedy It can maybe just even be a sociological or cultural one that like we have a culture that generates these figures. Where pain, whether deserved or not, transforms into sort of [00:35:00] a mass social violence.

And that’s really disturbing. Once you get past sort of, again, the easy armchair moralizing of like, people who do bad things are bad. Yeah, no, no fuck, no fucking shit. Jesus, that’s, that’s not insightful. That instead, taking the step further of like, well, the classic thing of like, how come, we know some of the answers to this, but how come mass gun violence is, one, predominantly American, we know some of the answers to that, but it’s also predominantly male, and predominantly cis male as well, and these become, there aren’t clear answers for that, and this is where I think sometimes if we merely look for Just structural oppression, which is obviously very fucking real and very horrible, it doesn’t make any sense.

You have to kind of look beyond that to like Generators of pain and isolation and alienation that maybe don’t come from those axes. I don’t know. it’s a very fruitful [00:36:00] and ugly challenge, which is again something that I feel like we’ve probably not only speak for both of us, but like anyone who likes horror. I like when it challenges me in a really ugly difficult way. That’s something I really treasure about like good horror

RS: Mm.

Langdon: But it’s like not giving me the easy like pat me on the back you think racism’s bad. And i’m like I do.

Yeah. Thanks. Which a lot of stuff sort of solids itself with. Again, you don’t need to be an ethical genius to be like, racial antipathy is wrong. That’s just correct. It is really insane though, how the handling of, supernatural elements in this work, which also are, technically they’re in the film because like there’s no clear… they never say how the tape works and she she crawls out of the tv in the film. But she doesn’t do in this at any point.

Uh,

RS: Right. There’s just a smell, there’s just sort of a citrus smell, and you feel like there’s something behind you, and you’re super scared, and then you’re dead.

Langdon: There is [00:37:00] the prophecy from the island that Sadako’s mom is born on and the weird idol that gets thrown into the ocean. And it’s like if something ever happens to this idol, a horrible thing will happen, like, classic thing, and then immediately after it’s thrown into the ocean, now this psychic bitch gets born.

They do have real psychic powers that are rigorously tested, and no one else in the novel does. It’s not like this is a widespread thing. It’s very strange, but it’s also well documented. And just, I really like that valence of weirding that’s a little bit more on the science fictional end than the film, in that , it dives into a bit more of the inquiry, the skeptical inquiry into it, but deliberately doesn’t do the cornball shit of like, nailing down the mechanics of it.

RS: No, thank god.

Langdon: Yeah, right?

RS: It’s vague enough to be, everybody has a little psychic energy. She just has more. That’s it.

Langdon: it’s just, huh, that’s, that’s crazy. When [00:38:00] they’re mulling over, like, do you think, do you think if we’d fuck around with a statue we could make this stop? I’m like, I don’t know, man. I’m gonna be honest, I don’t know. Couldn’t hurt, though. I’m scared of a statue being psychic and evil, though.

It lives in the ocean and is mad. Again, all of this stuff is, It’s interesting comparing this to the film, I think, in a lot of ways, because Asakawa in the book has a wife and a kid and then they have parents and and it At one point, I forget whether, so I know in this one, it’s revealed that the wife watches the video with the child. Um, I forget

RS: because Asakawa left the tape in the fucking VCR.

Langdon: I,

RS: He’s so bad at this. Even Ryuji’s like, bro, you fucked up. Come on, man. What were you doing

Langdon: he goes to, which is like such an on the nose metaphor for not caring about his, uh, his family and like allowing harm to come to them because he’s so obsessed with his own career path, which is [00:39:00] also most of the other, awful men in this can be sort of, summed up in that way of like, they’re so focused on achieving themselves that they just don’t give a fuck about

RS: father? Question mark? I feel like it’s implied in at least one of the adaptations that he’s not her biological father, this sort of professor dude who Sadako’s mother is with. I mean, originally I think she’s his side piece or something like that. He’s this professor of psychic research who’s much older than her and he ends up just sort of exploiting her and isn’t really interested in her well being.

I feel like in one of the adaptations it’s implied that, like, he’s really more like a stepdad and was fathered by something else.

Langdon: Uh, yeah, it’s like

RS: don’t think it appears in this book.

Langdon: There’s a lot of implication in I think it’s later books that her mom kind of like parthenogenesis Sadako. And then I it it it This shit gets crazy. There’s in later books Sadako straight up becomes Tomie. Those [00:40:00] who know know.

I think in a later one it also implies that Asakawa’s mom’s parents watched the tape as well. There’s just some weird, Shit that goes on with that. Like the the final scene being him racing home having acquired a VHS player that had like a dual deck so he could rub he could dupe the tape. And just racing home to do that is this really weird narratively weird place to end. Because it’s like it’s very high tension. But it’s also in a certain way very bland because he’s just driving. There’s no traffic or anything, it’s just like, God, I gotta dupe this tape.

I have like, two hours, and home’s thirty minutes away. But compared to the films, where, even in the, even in Ringu, they collapse all of Asakawa’s family in, into him, and make him into a woman. Which I think tilts the story in an interesting

RS: I [00:41:00] believe he has a kid, though. Well, she has a kid in Ringu,

in the Japanese film. Yeah,

Langdon: And then, and then in the American version, they make the Ryuji character

RS: Her ex husband or something, right?

Langdon: And it’s like, it’s funny because like, I, normally you look at adaptations and, whatever, we have all the tropes about that. But looking at that one, those are really smart things,

narrative choices, I think, especially if you aren’t intending if you aren’t intending to do the increasingly batshit sequels. Making this into a marital relation, mirrors Sadako’s life in such a satisfying way, even as they cut some of those elements from the film itself, like the resonant echo of that knife twist as well.

It’s piquant.

RS: Mm.

Langdon: Yeah, my shocking hot take The Ring is a good film

RS: Yeah, my shocking take that I, that I will tell anyone is that the American version of the movie’s better than the Japanese one. [00:42:00] Come fucking fight me. I’ll do it. Having a psychic character, putting a psychic character in a mystery is some bullshit. That is, no, you, you gotta like figure out the clues on your own.

You cannot just have a vision. Fuck you.

Langdon: Or if you do that, you gotta have more weird shit. So it’s like there’s con there’s constant disruption

RS: yeah.

Langdon: Like if it’s just one level of disruption then it feels like deus ex machina But if it’s like constant weird shit going on you’re like, whatever. I don’t I have no idea what’s going to happen in the next

RS: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But, uh, let’s talk a little bit about the structure of the book. It’s interesting that this book, it’s called Ring, and I mean it can refer to that ring of light that’s at the top of the well when when the cover’s on it and you can see a little bit there. But there’s this very cyclical structure in this book. I mean, there’s the the fact that it begins and where it ends It begins where Asakawa’s theory is that these kids caught some kind of virus and that’s where it ends. They did catch a [00:43:00] virus.

They caught, like, Psychic Smallpox Ghost. It begins at this cabin, and then it ends at It turns out, oh shit, we gotta go back to the cabin, cause that’s where Sadako is. There’s even like a structure. I don’t know if you notice, but he’s driving around in circles throughout the city on this ring road constantly.

He’s just going in circles while he’s driving, which is a really, really big part of this book, which is how it ends. It begins with him in a taxi cab and it ends with him again, driving on this, driving in fucking circles. And it’s this videotape of copying and sending. Copying it and showing it to someone else, which, again, is circling around, repeating this cycle, repeating this cycle, repeating this cycle, Sadako repeating the cycle of violence that has been done to her, this cyclic structure of something that’s just never gonna fucking end.

I think it’s perfect that the book ends where it is because it’s like, alright, we’re at the beginning of a new cycle. We don’t know exactly what’s gonna happen the next time, but we can kinda [00:44:00] guess. This is just the first cycle that’s, that’s played out in this way.

Langdon: It’s there’s something

RS: with my cat, so that’s why my chair is squeaking.

Hello, Harley.

Langdon: there’s something really brilliant about as well the way that um… so this ties into how in the midst of trying to solve their curse, Asakawa and Ryuji do a million different things that if… if Sadako was a reasonable ghost, so to speak, you would imagine would quell things. They find out, oh, she was just left in this well, and the, this cabin was built on top of the well.

That’s the other thing, is that, the tape seems to have literally emerged from Sadako, projecting her con her dead consciousness upward from the well, into the room that had videotapes, and just overwritten one random videotape, with her mind. Um, so they’re like, oh, let’s, let’s dig her up, and find her home, like the island she was born on, and let’s give, [00:45:00] give, properly inter her, and give her a burial with rites, let’s get the statue and put it back on the island, let’s, like, let’s right all of these wrongs that we found that are, cruel and unjust. And none of those are the thing.

The

RS: I know, it’s such a good twist. It’s so mean.

Langdon: It’s specifically that, and it goes back to that, that ring structure, it’s that she doesn’t want closure. She doesn’t want to break the cycle. That’s not what’s desired. It is just to repeat and replicate. That sense of replication is what, he does a pretty ingenious thing.

The next, the next book is called Loop, which I think fits. Because that’s like a circle of directionality, right? That’s like you are going in one of the two directions around a circle, but cycling forever, like it makes literal that the cycle rather than sort of the static object of a ring. And then the last one is called spiral, which is a loop that is then projected along [00:46:00] a second dimension.

So you’re not just circling around. But it’s it’s exactly that thing where it’s like this constant repetition of… and obviously on one hand , I think if someone were boring they’d be like, oh, well, that’s just sort of a gimmick and it’s like yeah You’ve you’ve cracked the code. Literature and art use artifice to uh, structurally embody themselves.

You’ve figured it out. I, I get annoyed with people who refer to like, structural motifs or organizing patterns as gimmicks. ’cause I’m like, you, you just don’t like books. I don’t, “oh, use chapters? How quaint,” like,

RS: When people say, “ah, this, this story used tropes.” Like, yeah, they all do that.

Langdon: that’s,

RS: That’s kind of what stories are made of, man.

Langdon: that’s an archetype. Sorry. You can,

RS: This song has notes in it.

Langdon: If you took one class on literature, including high school, you would know this. Like you were saying, he uses it to a narrative [00:47:00] end to specifically… there are points where you go, oh, there’s a Terminus here, and there was obvious Termini that show up, and deliberately crossing them out to go, no, this isn’t a story that ends.

This isn’t a story that, has closure. And there there’s something I especially find that kind of thing satisfying in In something like horror where I think sometimes we’re pushed to have a really pat ending to things. Like we even get this in general as writers being told like have an ending in mind, give a sense of closure and you know, have your denouement and all that kind of stuff that Typically gets broken in literary fiction because that’s not that’s not how life works ever like

RS: Yeah.

I mean we’re recording this on Juneteenth.

Langdon: The wounds of slavery have super duper not gone away, like ultra crazy hyper not gone away at all. And that’s picking something from You know at this point [00:48:00] nearing 200 years like 100 60 years ago now. You go further and further and you can still find these ugly repeating echoes of things.

And so it’s like it’s there’s something really satisfying about literalizing that.

RS: Yeah.

Langdon: He uses this analogy later on, he picks up the DNA thread in the immediate sequel, without getting too deep into that one. The chain and helical structure of DNA DNA as replicas of the ring and the loop and the spiral. He does this really ingenious like extrapolation of image metaphor for both narrative information, but then also structural organizational methodology, it’s just it it’s One of those things you go, uh, we were talking about this literally right before we hit record where it’s like damn this guy can actually write though

RS: He’s good at it. And I think the fact that the story ends the way it is is part of why it hits so hard because I mean, we’re all expecting this the first time you read it or the first time you watch the movie to [00:49:00] be like, okay. Okay, it’s done. It’s fine. They figured out what went on.

They, they’re giving her a proper burial. They set everything right, and then the dude dies anyway, and it’s like, what the fuck? No! No!

Langdon: other thing is that like so if I can give a a

RS: It’s so mean, it rocks.

Langdon: if I can give an immediate spoiler of something that happens early on in the second book because I think it like really deepens this point Is one of the first things they reveal? Asakawa’s family dies. They copy the tape and they die

RS: sucks

Langdon: is an extra level of like what the fuck. And again, that focus on constant knife twists.

Because again, if merely replicating the tape preserves you, okay, now you have closure. And even Asakawa’s thinking of it. It’s like, eventually, you’re replicating tape on tape on tape on tape, but if everyone’s seen the tape and everyone’s copied it, then, we’re all good. [00:50:00] And deliberately, again, seeking out any possible end to the narrative, per se, it does In a, like, again, deeply cruel way.

In the opening of the second book, Asakawa is fully catatonic and hasn’t spoken for months to anyone, cause his whole family died, even though in his mind he did everything right. And he lived. Is the other thing.

RS: Oh God, like the one who really doesn’t deserve to live,

Langdon: yeah, he’s

RS: going in terms of innocence,

Langdon: His family didn’t deserve to be brought into this and in his mind he’s like I don’t even really deserve to come out. He’s like “my best friend who’s awful.” Still his

RS: Or is he?

Langdon: yeah, that’s the other thing is

RS: That’s the other thing. Is that the truth, or is that thing that Ryuji’s student slash girlfriend said, is that also bullshit? Like, what we don’t really know, we don’t know from– I do find it interesting, though, that the way his death sequence At the end, so mirrors [00:51:00] the teen girl’s death at the beginning.

Here’s this innocent teen girl getting ready for her studies, trying to study for an exam, and she dies alone in the apartment. And here’s him, this potentially very innocent? Question mark? We don’t know. Person who, who dies in very much the same way, while trying to call his girlfriend for help, and all he can get out of the phone is to yell, to scream, because like, he’s getting attacked by whatever it is.

The question is, was his story about being a serial rapist bullshit? Was his girlfriend’s story also bullshit?

Langdon: There’s

RS: what is your deal? It is, okay, for Pride Month. In your opinion, is Ryuji an egg?

Langdon: Absolutely, there’s

RS: there is a, there are multiple moments where, like, out of the blue, in response to nothing and no one, he starts talking about how the ideal human being is neither male nor female, and non binary people are all incredibly hot.

They are just on a boat, they’re just traveling. And all of a sudden he just [00:52:00] says, “You know what? L Let me talk about how intersex people are all incredibly, insanely hot and completely flawless.” Like, Okay, Ryuji, those are very cisgender thoughts to have. Thank

Langdon: And it’s, it,

RS: this with me.

Langdon: it’s funny because I’ve seen some really callous interpretations of that, but it feels to me, especially if you know, kind of the political trajectory of a lot of the writers in this, this sort of sector of Japanese art. Unsurprisingly, it’s not really promoted very much that Hayao Miyazaki was a member of the Youth Communist League when he was younger.

And like, various things like that. They’re they’re not just a little political. They’re like very political , and some of them had fallings out with say the Japanese communist party and things like that, but It’s still fallings out based on like I have a political directionality and i’m not sure that we’re doing it versus like i’ve become bored of politics as I get older. That the more you know that the more apparent it is that the valence of inexplicable violence against queer people and specifically [00:53:00] using Sadako as coming from it’s implied that she’s Ryukyuan rather than um Japanese because of roughly where the islands would be which is Without– I only know this because my spouse is Ryukyuan.

Otherwise, I would not have known this at all. But like Okinawa Up until like the mid 1800s was not part of Japan. It was the capital island of a completely different kingdom called Ryukyu. And Japan, in one of their earlier bits of imperialism, just kinda invaded it out of nowhere. And eventually they were like, fine, fuck it, you can annex us.

And it’s viewed as in Japan is similar to the issues with the Ainu, where if you ask like a regular Japanese person, they may or may not be aware or even really care, but if you ask people like from Okinawa, they go, I’m not Japanese, I’m Okinawan. Or if you ask someone from one of the smaller Ryukyuan islands, they’re like, I’m Ryukyuan, I’m not Japanese.

Stuff like that. That to have basically a Ryukyuan intersex person, [00:54:00] experience this kind of violence, both physical and sexual, and then have Ryuji pontificate on this. He’s really trying to make sure that you understand that he’s like, it’s not incidental that she’s queer, and she’s not queer and intersects in like a monstrous way, it’s that everyone treats her like it’s monstrous, and it’s not.

RS: Yeah.

She’s just this hot girl who just wants to be an actress, man.

Langdon: In future books in the series, every now and again you’ll get some further information about her past, especially in the acting troupe. And it’s, it’s all heartbreaking shit. It’s like, oh yeah, she left this really abusive and exploitative thing and was really committed to acting. And everyone treated her like garbage because of it, because they thought she was weird and sexy, but because she was intersex they had like gay panic even though she’s like, “I don’t I’m I’m just a woman. That’s just the conditions of my birth, but I’m a woman. You can be normal.” And like really horrible cruel shit. It’s [00:55:00] likewise.

I think really fascinating to me that And for people who’ve only read Ring, I think their reticence to find this interesting is fair, but Like, it’s one of those things that you have to just be assured it is very compelling. Ryuji becomes the counterpoint to Sadako as sort of the structural pole, and it’s, it’s, I, going back to your comment about his pontification about non binary and intersex people, I don’t think it’s incidental that these two figures who represent either embodied or deep pontification of that kind of embodied queerness become the two poles of this story overall .

I was telling you some of it in private. I’m not gonna repeat it here Y’all just gotta

RS: he somehow gets weirder in the sequels to this book, which is, which is quite, which, given who he is in this book, is quite an accomplishment to say, to take this guy and make him even fucking weirder.

Langdon: It radically re [00:56:00] It makes you go back and reinterpret again like All of what you know about Ryuji. Oh, another fun factoid about the second book that I just remembered. His assistant, is revealed to have watched the tape, while it was in his, while it was in Ryuji’s office, but she was ovulating.

So she gives virgin birth to Sadako, who grows to a fully grown woman, in less than a week. Oh, that’s so crazy.

RS: course. Yeah. Mm hmm.

Langdon: Yeah, this shit’s so fire. You read it and you go immediately, Oh, I know why people were bending over backwards to make films out of this, because like, before the American one came out, there was the TV version, then the Japanese version, then I think the Korean version got made next, then the American version.

There have been, as people know, they made, the film version of like Ring 2 [00:57:00] which is completely unrelated. There’s uh Ring the Final Chapter, which was a tv series in Japan. There was The Ring Virus, which I think was the oh, that was a Korean one. The fact there’s something also satisfying given the notion of Sadako as this literally this virus that replicates and mutates. That there are so many adaptations that are so different from one another and like discontiguous, It’s one of the few times that that feels like structurally satisfying

RS: hmm.

Langdon: Like it’d be way less interesting if it was just a continuous series. Like if it was the sequel is part two of a never ending Whatever. One of the one of the big critiques not the biggest one But one of the big critiques of the marvel films when they hopefully they seem like they’re dying.

Hopefully they’re dying. Is that none of them feel like they have a beginning or end. They all feel like the middle part of a perpetual [00:58:00] telescoping thing so like you never get any sense of narrative closure from anything. And these feel uh, almost like the opposite. In that you never get closure because it constantly fully upends what you think you know about it and then just stops and you go “certainly the next one will answer these questions” and No, it just gives you new different questions. What’s so dope? I’m such a big fan. I can’t I could talk

about these

RS: it’s a very good book. Highly recommended, if, even though we’ve spoiled all of it, if you haven’t read the book, read the book! It’s, it’s a really quick read. It’s short, it’s tight, it feels very dense, even though it’s very short, and it’s, it is a real page turner. It’s extremely compelling.

Langdon: And it’s

RS: Absolutely read this crazy ass book.

Langdon: And one of the great benefits of it Even if like even if this part’s spoiled is read the book and then the minute it’s done I promise, you’ll go onto the wiki for The Ring and look at how many other [00:59:00] stuff there is and how wildly different all of it is. And if you have even a modicum of good taste, you’ll be like, Holy shit, I have to check this shit out, like, I have to know what else gets done with this.

RS: Yeah. You really do. You really do.

Langdon: It’s

RS: In conclusion, Ryuji, what is your deal?

Langdon: You fucking wacko.

RS: You strange little creature. You weird little man.

Langdon: He’s kinda like if a goblin was the size of a fully grown guy.

RS: Just a strange little man.

Langdon: Yeah,

RS: uh, Yeah, I, I don’t even know what else to say about him, man. Every, everything, every line of dialogue, he’s just like, What the fuck were you doing? That he, that he’s introduced by saying, like, What is it? ” I want to witness the end of the world, dig a hole into the earth, and ejaculate into it over and over again.”

Langdon: he’s just like that, the whole, the whole book too. Like

RS: The whole entire book.

Langdon: be just chilling and he’ll be like, Asakawa. I was, I [01:00:00] was thinking of something and he is like, is it normal or crazy? Like the, like the classic thing is this, is the gym creepy or wet?

RS: Yeah,

Langdon: It is like, oh, it’s normal and uh, it’s crazy.

RS: of course. It’s always something fucking insane.

Langdon: like,

he leaves a suicide note for Asakawa, not, not, not the, the, the person who he, he says is his girlfriend and then isn’t? Just at all?

RS: Yeah. Or is she? But they do have a close relationship, obviously.

Langdon: It’s such a,

RS: It’s so strange.

Langdon: Again, people, people who’ve only read a bit will not love it. God, I love Ryuji. What a wild character. You, you know, you get in a thrill when he shows up.

RS: Yes. I mean, Asakawa’s, Asakawa’s reasoning of, ” I’m gonna get this guy involved in it, cause one, he’ll be super into it, and two, it’s, I’m okay with it if he dies.” Like, that’s pretty sound reasoning, I have to admit. Just, just, this fucking guy. This, that fucking [01:01:00] guy. Ryuji.

Langdon: I think the thing that I like most about the book and there’s all this like interior stuff that that’s just a reader is satisfying and then as a writer is a really great way to show that like you can do these somewhat higher minded structural image symbolic, uh, motifs and pull them out and extrapolate them in all these different ways, but still have like a really compelling, super high intensity, like plot forward thriller feeling.

Like you don’t have to go abstract with it. It’s cool to go abstract too. Not knocking or literary stuff, but you can still be very thoughtful and make like a fucking thrill ride of a book. But it’s, it’s specifically, and uh, I’ve read the book three times now. Over the course of my life, and I’m always left in just a gibbering, salivating mess by the end.

I’m like, oh, I gotta tell more people about this book, it’s so fucking sick. And it’s, especially the more stuff you read, I’m not sure if this has happened for you, but like, it’s not that I like less stuff, cause I [01:02:00] deliberately, I deliberately try not to read stuff that I think just fucking sucks.

Cause I’ve hate read enough stuff in my life.

RS: Yeah, I can’t do that.

Langdon: I can do it if it’s gonna be like that, like that book Trigger Warning in which a right winger presents, uh, Antifa’s literal super soldiers, which is, frankly, kind of dope. Um,

RS: awesome. Good for them.

Langdon: Yeah, it’s very sick. He thinks it’s bad, but it’s instead very sick, but like, it’s still hard sometimes to find a book that like gets me

thrilled like a 14 year old that just heard death metal for the first time. You’re like, yo! But this book always gets me amped like that. Cause it’s brainy and psychotic.

RS: It sure is.

Langdon: If that’s not a pitch, I don’t know what is.

RS: Yeah, so definitely read Ring. Read it. It’s good. You will not regret reading Ring. You might feel very weird after you read it, but you will not regret reading it. It will stay in your head for a long time, though. And [01:03:00] also, I remember reading this a second time and going, You will “Okay, how does Ryuji know the average blink speed of a woman versus a man?”

And then I realized, you know, Ryuji would just happen to fucking know this. He, he just would just happen to have this information in his brain, because remember this is 1991, you couldn’t google it yet. I, I do believe that Ryuji is the kind of guy who would just know the average human blink speed by gender.

Langdon: I, I also like how he brings it up kind of Not out of nowhere, it’s That’s not really what I mean. I’m trying to figure it out. He’s so nonchalant with the information, he doesn’t elaborate where he gets it. Where you say, oh yeah, of course it’s that. That’s the average blink speed of a, of a, of an adult woman.

And you’re like, oh. And also Asakawa’s like, oh yeah, of course, yeah, thanks.

RS: Right,

Langdon: And you’re like

RS: you Of course you know that, Ryuji. Why would you not know that? Why would anyone not happen to know that information? [01:04:00] He’s a strange man.

Langdon: So people within a certain age range, I think, view things like Reddit or TikTok or even big chunks of Twitter and stuff like that as a way to get real information that hasn’t been filtered by X or Y kind of immediately and have like immediate access to it.

But kind of. The older you get, intellectually, not necessarily by age, the more you go, no, these are just charlatans who speak with insane levels of confidence. And sometimes they are right, but sometimes they’re insanely wrong, but the tone is always the same. Like it’s never delivered with any level of doubt.

And it comes across so natural that unless you train yourself to like pause for a second, you, you’re very inclined to just believe it. Which is like in a certain way, that’s Ryoji’s whole thing. He just says fucking whatever, but with a level of calm confidence that you just go, yeah, of course.

RS: Yeah, and it’s like, well, [01:05:00] okay, Asakawa, are you gonna go spend the limited time you have because you have this tight deadline to fucking go to the library and look up blinkspeed? Are you gonna do that? No, you’re fucking not. So just, when I tell you that this is a woman blinking, you’re gonna fucking believe me.

Langdon: It also reminds me of the way that um, a lot of people Not just get away with acting smarter than other people, but the also the mechanic for why so many people feel insecure when someone’s just talking and they interpret them as significantly smarter than them even if it’s not strictly true. Because it seems to follow that same thing of like you witness someone speaking with a level of confidence about some topic And it provokes either An adoration or like a complete dismissal and resentment which is Also a really insane thing.

RS: Sorry, I was wrestling with the cat again. He’s, he’s being annoying.

Langdon: No one needs to complain about, or apologize rather, about wrestling with a cat. [01:06:00] That’s very important work.

RS: Yeah, yeah. It is, isn’t it? I gotta make sure he doesn’t hit the power button on this computer again like he did that one time. During a previous book club. He just turned off my computer midway through recording the Geek Love episode.

Langdon: well, he was done.

RS: Yeah. We were not done, however. We were not done,

Langdon: yeah, but he was done.

RS: He was done. Alright, but I think we are done, because we’ve been talking for about an hour and fifteen minutes, and we’re running out of speed, and it is time for me to give my kitty cats their treats. So before we go, Langdon, what do you have to promote?

Langdon: Uh, really just, uh, my continued work over at Death Sentence. Gareth rejoined us a little over a year ago now, I think maybe, maybe around two years

now. And we’ve just been cooking as a three man team. Just a lot of different all of us sort of have different directions that we want to point in and some that overlap. So it’s just the show has a lot more variety now. Which makes us all really happy.

We have a [01:07:00] discord now as well Where we talk about dope books, dope music and if you talk about whack shit, we’ll ban you and ideally ideally sic super soldiers on you to burn your home down. You That’s ideal, the Patreon money is limited so super soldier budget Less than what i’d want.

And aside from that I have continued work over at uh, treblezine. com doing a bunch of music criticism and a Uh extreme metal column on consequence of sound called mining metal where I talk about dope death metal every month

RS: Very nice. Alright, well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Langdon: Yeah, no problem

RS: And thank you all for supporting us. Until next time, keep reading and keep writing good.