Koji suzuki’s edge (2012)

Elana Gomel Koji Suzuki’s Edge (2012) Perhaps the most iconic image of the intersection between Gothic and technology is a Japanese girl crawling on all fours out of a TV set, her face veiled with hanging hair. The girl (Sadako in the Japanese version; Samara in the American remake) is both a ghost and a virus; a vengeful spirit and a cross between smallpox and a VCR glitch. Internationally popular, having spawned a multitude of movies, TV series, computer games, parodies and pastiches, Koji Suzuki’s Ring (1991), which introduced Sadako first to the Japanese and then to Western audiences, has become a paragon of technological horror. Almost twenty years later Koji Suzuki published a new novel Edge (2008). Far from achieving the popularity of its predecessor, Edge was panned by critics and met with a lukewarm reception by fans. The main complaint was that the novel was overburdened with scientific information and lacked the horror punch of its predecessor. A devastating review in World Literature Today was fairly typical: Further potholes fill the narrative road: information dumps on a wild range of topics, including Japanese folklore, black holes, plate tectonics, the history of hieroglyphs, the origin of sight and the evolution of the eye, geomagnetism, antimatter, wormholes, sunspots, the demise of the dinosaurs, enough ancient-civilization mysteries to delight Erich von Däniken, and mathematics. Lots of mathematics. (World Literature Today 2013) But I will argue that ‘lots….