Dark Water by Koji Suzuki Review

 

Summary (No Spoilers):

Dark Water by Koji Suzuki is an anthology of horror stories, and the common connection between them is all of the stories have some connection to water. Some might be set on yachts and boats, but others might be in more mundane settings, like an apartment building.

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In-Depth Review (Spoilers Ahead!):

Floating Water

The original short story is connected to the movie Dark Water, which was the sole the reason I bought this book, but it honestly fell short of expectations. 

I've started noticing Koji Suzuki writes women the same way throughout the books, and it's not a good look. This mother is pretty horrible and controlling without any redeemable qualities to her, especially in her treatment of her young daughter.

But there are some really unsettling bits of imagery throughout that I enjoyed, especially with the water tank on the rooftop scene, as it feels like a struggle that is not just physical but also mental, and then the bath scene at the end as well, which was just chilling and unsettling.

So I'll give that one a 3/5 for the imagery, but it fell flat on overall execution.

Solitary Isle

The strongest story by far in this anthology. It's an eerie story about the ghost of a woman stranded on an artificial island called Battery No 6. It centers around a young man with a kind of terrible best friend, like he's awful to women and especially his girlfriend. And then he kills her on that artificial island and leaves her there! Or that's what he told the young man on his death bed. And what does said the young man do about it...?

Crickets chirping.

He does nothing. Seriously! There is a lack of likeable characters throughout the anthology, but man, these two guys really suck.

Well, sort of.

The twist of the story comes up a few years later when the young man gets invited to go onto some science-y expedition, and that's when we really see the twist unfold because... well... there's something weird going on on the island. Here's the shock: there's a little boy on the island and a grave for his long-dead mother.

Yeah, the best friend never actually killed her... He left her on the island because that's what she wanted, to live there and raise their child. Except somehow or other, she kicked the bucket, and now her little kid is half-feral and definitely traumatized by the whole mess. But it was an interesting ending, like I was eating it up the way it was written!

So I'll give that one a 5/5 for the twists and turns the story took, along with how interesting the setting was.

The Hold

Honestly this was a story about a shitty abusive father who works on a boat, and it didn't hold me that well. Like it follows this father as he berates his poor child and treats him like dirt, then he comes home to be even more of an asshole about his family, and then there's the creeping issue of his wife just... not coming home.

Oh wait. That's solved too when he goes out on his boat to get his fishing on, because yeah, he does that. And he sure loves to have weird internal dialogue about his time on the boat, like he's just kind of a nasty guy who... killed his wife. Yup. No one's shocked.

The only redemption to this one was the ending, where the boat started sinking during the storm and he tried to get out, but his wife's body blocked the way, and he starts hallucinating that he's about to be saved, so he like... is found sucking on the long-dead corpse fingers of his wife. That's weird, but like it is funny he got fucked over by her in the end. Deserved.

Yeah, I'm giving this one a 1/5 because it's just a weird, boring, and unpleasant read overall.

Dream Cruise

This story was apparently adapted into an episode of Masters of Horror that I've yet to see. It's about a man who got dragged onto a yacht by a couple who enjoy pyramid schemes and enduring a creepy time on their yacht, so it's morbidly funny. He spends the whole time lying to them so they'll stop trying to recruit him, but they're so persistent it's like it doesn't even impact them. 

There's a lot of good creepy ghostly imagery as well with the dead little boy, like starting with his shoe showing up and then all this talk about him playing under the wheel. Just... eugh. Poor kid.

When the man finally escapes the couple from hell by swimming off to save himself, it's super funny, and it also doubles as a mystery solver because... yeah, the poor kid fell off that big wall. It's got a decent mix of sad and creepiness with the sense of humor, and it just felt tonally very different from the other stories.

This one gets a 5/5 because I loved the humor it had and the creepy imagery.

Adrift

This story was apparently the inspiration for Open Water 2: Adrift, which I've never seen. It was another story set on a boat, and that's starting to get a little old, not gonna lie. And while it had some redeeming qualities, it simply did not do enough. 

A fishing crew comes upon a creepy abandoned ghost ship, but a bright-eyed new guy on the crew misses all the creeped out behaviors somehow and volunteers to stay with the ship to keep an eye on it. Only issue is... well, shit gets weird.

It had a bit of an epistolary format of uncovering what happened to the previous occupants, a family who often went traveling, and it showed how they fell to madness and all presumably died, but the little girl stashed something on the ship, so the new guy went looking to find it (while also going mad, like he kept losing track of himself and doing really bad stuff to ruin his odds of getting back to his crew). But hey, maybe the little girl's secret stash was means of escape.

And here's the only good part of that whole mess: it was all eldritch. Basically. Like there's some creepy eyeball monster hanging out in there, and well, by leaving the boat with the thing in the bags of supplies, the new guy basically fucked himself over to repeat the cycle. I did really like that part and it reminded me of some stuff from that manga Cat Eyed Boy, so maybe this would've been more of a hit in manga format for me.

This story gets a 2/5 because the ending gives it that much, and I do love an epistolary format, but it just wasn't that interesting.

Watercolors

This was a pleasant change of scenery, now set in the behind the scenes of a local theater troupe (sort of). There's a whole storyline about how this man was originally an actor in a decent role, but he liked this one woman that the director also liked, and in some sort of dramatic bit of events, he got pushed off the acting team and off to do backstage work. 

And so there's this issue going on with one of the bathrooms, so this poor actor is sent off to deal with it... except he's clearly never fixed a malfunctioning sink in his life, because the way he struggles is almost hilarious. And he is just so miserable and sad as he tries to fix this bathroom leak up, and it's got all this interesting imagery, not to mention the absurdity, and then the twist is like...

He's still an actor! It's all a role. It was really silly and funny and a nice change of scenery, which is the only reason I liked it as much as I did, but there are definitely some flaws. Still, it was so funny to me picturing seeing this as an actual stage play people are watching. Like why?

So for the humor and the twist, this one's a solid 3/5.

Forest under the Sea 

The only reason this story gets as good of a rating as it does is for the way it is formatted, as the first part happens about 20 years before the second, and it connects into the prologue and epilogue. There's a lot of pieces to the puzzle, even if the premise is kind of meh. 

 The first part of the story follows a family man (who sucks at being a family man honestly) and his friend (who gets fat-shamed, like a lot) from their little spelunking club finding this undiscovered cave. And that's so exciting to them, especially the family man who has had to give up adventuring for child rearing (oh the horrors! like just don't have kids, man), that they go further and further with no supplies, until they find this boulder covering a hole leading further down.

The family man starts making his way down it, but then there's some problem with all the rubble, and it messes with their shoddy work to keep the boulder from moving, so it kills the friend and his body falls over the hole, blocking his way out. And then he more or less falls into madness from low supplies and his inaction, so he kills himself trying to swim to freedom, but his cassette tape with a will hidden inside makes it out through... and that leads to the next part.

So here's the part where the man's son shows up, and it turns out he got the cassette tape will mysteriously offered to him in the mail, and it inspired him so much he showed up to follow in his deceased father's footsteps and look around the cave for himself. He's better than his father in every way, which I find funny, even if that's probably not the intention here.

All the connections make it at least interesting, even if the story drags a lot at the start, so I'll give it a 3/5.

Prologue/Epilogue

I really liked the change of pace with an older woman as the main character, as this is one of the few women I think has been decently handled, even if the way her disability is talked about bugs me a little. Her story wraps into Forest under the Sea, which is pretty neat, but I kind of wish she had more of a story of her own instead of one around some random man she's never met.

The prologue begins with the older woman telling her granddaughter about strange treasures that can be found out along the beach, which sets up the stories pretty nicely.

And then the epilogue finishes it up by showing a little of the old woman's story. She hurt her leg pretty badly and worried she'd never walk properly again, but she found the strength and courage from a cassette tape with a letter inside it from a mysterious man talking to his son. She basically got stronger to walk to the address on foot to give the letter to the son, and she managed to achieve it, which made her super happy.

This was a pretty cute little story that connected well into the other story, but it's a shame there wasn't much of a story of its own, so it's a decent 3/5. 

Book Rating 3/5