Remember that old horror movie, The Ring? Inspiration for the more recent Rings? (I actually missed that one. Must get on that.) If you’re a big horror fan you know it’s a remake of a Japanese film, Ringu. If you like to read you know they’re both based on the novel Ringu, by Koji Suzuki. You might also know that Ringu is actually the first book of a trilogy–Ring, Spiral, and Loop. (Ring’s the best, though Spiral is also pretty good.)

What you don’t know is that . . . (drumroll please . . . ) my brother helped translate that trilogy into English. His name’s on the cover and everything–translator Glynne Walley. My own brother is a very tiny piece of horror history.

When the English movie became a hit, Koji Suzuki’s publishers wanted to clean up the English translation of the book and rerelease it for fans. (He shares credit on the first book with the original translator, Robert Rohmer.) My brother, a poor grad student at the time, took the job as a freelancer. They liked his work so much that they hired him to translate the rest of the trilogy for English language release.

I kind of forgot about this until yesterday when I was scanning horror recommendations for something to read. I was scrolling through Barnes & Noble’s 25 most terrifying horror books ever and saw that hey, my “brother’s book” was on the list. The cover art is awful and you can hardly make out anyone’s name, even Suzuki’s. The names are that tiny inner wring of writing around the skull. They reissued the whole trilogy recently when they made Rings, and I like the new cover art a lot better. And my brother’s name’s still on it. 😉

Old cover art:

New cover art, where you can actually make our people’s names: