Book Review: The Crimson Labyrinth, by Yusuke Kishi
A deadly survival thriller, translated from Japanese.
Vertical, 2006, 288 pages
From a rising new star of horror comes a killer read that will make you lose track of time and reality. The Crimson Labyrinth is a wicked satire on extremist reality TV in the tradition of The Running Man-if that indeed is what it is. Welcome to THE MARS LABYRINTH where things aren't what they seem. Welcome to the world of Kishi, where the plot is as gnarly as the humor is twisted.
When an unemployed former math major wakes up one day, he wonders if he's somehow ended up on the red planet. The good-looking young woman with aid-she says her name is Ai and that she draws erotic comics for a living-seems to have no clue either as to their whereabouts. Their only leads are cryptic instructions beamed to a portable device. Has the game begun?
There is no reset button, no saving and no continue-make the wrong move and it's really GAME OVER. In the cruel world of THE MARS LABYRINTH, mercy and compassion are only for the weak or the very, very strong. The stakes are nothing less than your life-and apparently a lot of money.
If you're a fan of Lost or Battle Royale, don't miss this one.
The Crimson Labyrinth, the first book translated into English by best-selling Japanese horror author Yusuke Kishi, is a survival thriller that falls loosely into the same category as books like Battle Royale, The Running Man, and The Hunger Games. Random people are thrown together into an "arena" and made to fight for their lives. There is the usual tension over who will cooperate and who will betray their allies, who will survive, and a mystery around who engineered this spectacle and why.
The protagonist, Yoshihiko Fujiki, is an unemployed loser who wakes up in a red desert with no memory of how he got there. He finds a handheld game machine that greets him with cheerful instructions informing him that he is in THE MARS LABYRINTH and must survive the game to win the prize money and return to Earth.
THE MARS LABYRINTH turns out to be an old choose-your-own-adventure SF novel, and whoever created this game apparently decided to create a live-action version of it, pitting a group of strangers who were all abducted, like Fujiki, from Japan and dumped in a remote Australian national park known as the Bungle Bungle.
Fujiki teams up with one of the women in the group, and from there the plot proceeds in a mostly predictable fashion: the group splits into factions, each of them are given different instructions and survival items, some emerge as predators and some as victims, there are players who know more than they let on, and gradually the cast of characters is whittled down in brutal and violent fashion.
I've read a few Japanese SF novels now, including some by authors whose names were not Haruki Murakami. The Crimson Labyrinth "feels" Japanese. Even while fighting for his life, the protagonist is very passive and introspective. The characters are not much more than descriptions of their appearance and actions. The Australian geography and flora and fauna is described more vividly; I felt like the Bungle Bungle itself was the most interesting character in the book. Most Japanese, the ending is weird and inconclusive and doesn't really answer the questions raised throughout the book.
This didn't have quite the same feeling of adrenaline and visceral horror as Battle Royale, despite being better and more carefully written, but it was an interesting kind of novelized "choose-your-own-adventure" death test with a few interesting twists, and some rather improbable gimmicks (methed-up taipans!).
This guy is mean enough without being drugged.
My complete list of book reviews.
Vertical, 2006, 288 pages
From a rising new star of horror comes a killer read that will make you lose track of time and reality. The Crimson Labyrinth is a wicked satire on extremist reality TV in the tradition of The Running Man-if that indeed is what it is. Welcome to THE MARS LABYRINTH where things aren't what they seem. Welcome to the world of Kishi, where the plot is as gnarly as the humor is twisted.
When an unemployed former math major wakes up one day, he wonders if he's somehow ended up on the red planet. The good-looking young woman with aid-she says her name is Ai and that she draws erotic comics for a living-seems to have no clue either as to their whereabouts. Their only leads are cryptic instructions beamed to a portable device. Has the game begun?
There is no reset button, no saving and no continue-make the wrong move and it's really GAME OVER. In the cruel world of THE MARS LABYRINTH, mercy and compassion are only for the weak or the very, very strong. The stakes are nothing less than your life-and apparently a lot of money.
If you're a fan of Lost or Battle Royale, don't miss this one.
The Crimson Labyrinth, the first book translated into English by best-selling Japanese horror author Yusuke Kishi, is a survival thriller that falls loosely into the same category as books like Battle Royale, The Running Man, and The Hunger Games. Random people are thrown together into an "arena" and made to fight for their lives. There is the usual tension over who will cooperate and who will betray their allies, who will survive, and a mystery around who engineered this spectacle and why.
The protagonist, Yoshihiko Fujiki, is an unemployed loser who wakes up in a red desert with no memory of how he got there. He finds a handheld game machine that greets him with cheerful instructions informing him that he is in THE MARS LABYRINTH and must survive the game to win the prize money and return to Earth.
THE MARS LABYRINTH turns out to be an old choose-your-own-adventure SF novel, and whoever created this game apparently decided to create a live-action version of it, pitting a group of strangers who were all abducted, like Fujiki, from Japan and dumped in a remote Australian national park known as the Bungle Bungle.
Fujiki teams up with one of the women in the group, and from there the plot proceeds in a mostly predictable fashion: the group splits into factions, each of them are given different instructions and survival items, some emerge as predators and some as victims, there are players who know more than they let on, and gradually the cast of characters is whittled down in brutal and violent fashion.
I've read a few Japanese SF novels now, including some by authors whose names were not Haruki Murakami. The Crimson Labyrinth "feels" Japanese. Even while fighting for his life, the protagonist is very passive and introspective. The characters are not much more than descriptions of their appearance and actions. The Australian geography and flora and fauna is described more vividly; I felt like the Bungle Bungle itself was the most interesting character in the book. Most Japanese, the ending is weird and inconclusive and doesn't really answer the questions raised throughout the book.
This didn't have quite the same feeling of adrenaline and visceral horror as Battle Royale, despite being better and more carefully written, but it was an interesting kind of novelized "choose-your-own-adventure" death test with a few interesting twists, and some rather improbable gimmicks (methed-up taipans!).
This guy is mean enough without being drugged.
My complete list of book reviews.