Book excerpt: Kurôzu-cho, a small fogbound town on the coast of Japan, is cursed. But the spirit which haunts it does not have a name or a body, only a shape: uzumaki the spiral, the hypnotic secret shape of the world. It possessed the father of teenage Kirie's withdrawn boyfriend Shuichi, causing him to remake himself in its image before he died. It grows in ferns, in seashells, in curls of hair, and in the crooked folds of the human brain. Giant snails are sighted near the high school. An eerie glow shines from the abandoned lighthouse. Mosquitoes fly in drowsy curves and feed on blood. As more people are caught in the pattern, over the town of Kurôzu-cho hangs the spiral smoke of cremated corpses; because even in death, there is no escape...