Water, it has a stong effect on our subconscious, whether it be a stream, lake, pond, or ocean. It bring us back to our primordial past, back to the womb, therefore it is full of mystery and sometimes unsettling feelings. All the tales in Dark Water relate to water in one manner or another.

The first story is chilling enough to make one never want to drink tap water ever again. I can see why this was made into a movie, an everyday thing in our lives has been transformed into something completely vile.

Although Koji Suzuki is more known for his stories that relate to horror/supernatural, not every story in this book has a supernatural slant, some are just plain though provoking and strange. Solitary Isle and Forest Under the Sea aren't as supernatural and rely more on those primal, subconcious feelings.

For fans of the supernatural there are chilling stories like The Hold, and Dream Cruise, one speaks of a man's descent into madness after the disappearance of his wife, and the other tells of a man's wish to sail in a yacht when the crew on his fishing boat find an abandoned one on the ocean.

I can see why some people see Koji Suzuki as the Japanese Stephen King, his writings are able to capture the imagination in fantastic ways that can leave one feeling unsettled for hours after reading.

Koji Suzuki, Dark Water (Vertical Press, 2004)

Despite Hideo Nakata having made a film of the same title, Dark Water is, in fact, a collection of short stories. (The film is based on the first story in here, but it's hard to imagine how Nakata managed to get the film out of this story.) Suzuki is a crack novelist, to be sure, but his short story-writing capabilities are less obvious; the stories here all follow a sort of structural pattern which may be common in Japanese short stories, though it's not to be found in most other Japanese short story writers whose work exists in translation; I have to believe that the problem lies not with a structure defined alone piece in the book. No, Suzuki spends a good deal of time building his characters and situations, then suddenly decides to wrap everything up in a paragraph or two, completely changing pace and structural details. I could see it in one story, but in all of them?

Those of you who pick this up on the strength of Nakata's film, be aware that the movie is, in this case, better than the material upon which it is based. Everyone else will probably feel somewhat cheated that such brilliant setups get such short shrift at the end of each story. The setups, though, are reason enough to read the stories here. Just hope Hideo Nakata has the rights to a number of them. ***