Ring cycle: The Village Voice reviews Spiral, Koji Suzuki's sequel to Ring:

"Spiral's principal pleasure lies in the invention with which Suzuki works variations on the motifs of the original novel. Even as the English word ring fluctuates between noun and verb, so both a videotape and a virus occupy 'a point between the animate and the inanimate' -- they need humans in order to reproduce. And indeed, it turns out that exposure to the images infects the body with a virus looking remarkably like a wedding ring, which performs its own alchemic marriage of opposites. The viewer is impregnated with the storyteller herself: a hermaphrodite."