There is no spoon…
Loop (Ring #3)
Author: Koji Suzuki
Translator: Glenn Walley
Pages: 288
Format: Paperback
Published: January 1, 2000
Publisher: Vertical
View on Goodreads
Date Completed: July 27, 2024
My rating: 
Thoughts
It’s tough to talk about this one without giving too many spoilers. But I’ll give it a shot…
In this book, we follow Kaoru Futami, a “youth mature beyond his years.” Basically, there’s this cancer infecting people all over the world and it’s viral, like AIDS. His father ends up with it, so Kaoru does what he can to research a cure. But first, he needs to figure out what this cancer even is and where it came from.
What he discovers is that it came from… an unlikely source. He ends up traveling to New Mexico in the US to learn more about the secretive Loop project, a virtual matrix created by scientists. Something his father had worked on more than 20 years ago.
From there, it starts tying into the greater Ring universe.
I loved that this was still a fairly stand-alone book. It gives a lot of details from the previous books, but it also expands on what we saw and learned in those stories. And where it ends up? I didn’t see that coming until it was almost upon me…
That’s really all I think I want to say about this one so that I don’t give away anything that isn’t already on the back cover of the book. Suffice it to say that I really enjoyed this and was not prepared for the journey this trilogy has taken me on.
This wasn’t my favorite book of the first three, but it still gets 5 out of 5 stars. I feel like there was a little more it could have explored from an existential perspective. But I’ll concede that the book dives pretty far into that already and has enough other things going on that maybe this wasn’t the place for more.
