Here's something interesting from South Korea, first published there in Korean in 2024 and now in English translation by Archana Madhavan. The label on the back cover merely says "fiction" but it seems to be more commonly lumped into the literary horror genre, the vampire imagery present in the cover art unmistakable. Yet the back cover blurb fairly sets us up for police procedural. All of these takes are valid but the one that works least is rather oddly the latter, given that it's the primary approach taken.

What it misses is that, while the cops in the story are doing their best to find what they believe is a serial killer, it isn't one, at least in the sense they expect, and they're doomed to failure. This is an awful long way away from a story of good guys hunting a bad guy whose inevitable capture will save the day. The closest comparison I can throw it is to Eman Quotah's 'The Night is Not for You', almost a Middle Eastern equivalent to this. Both are stories about apparent serial killers written in poetic prose and drenched in feminine rage. Neither turn out how we expect.

This one starts, appropriately enough, with a woman being attacked. She's Geum-hong and she's not even the target. That's her daughter Jeong-ya, who's stabbed to death by her boyfriend, but Geum-hong is there and so she gets trawled into the violence. She collapses from his punch to her face in the very first line and we have to wonder if she survives the page. Spoiler: she does, but it happened in 2017 and that makes this a prologue in anything but name. The chapter is numbered zero to underline that.

As you might imagine from that start, you may have a call to make. If you're triggered by violence against women, then this may not be a book for you. However, I'd ask one thing before you make that call: are you more triggered by violence against women or violence against men who commit violence against women? Because, while this will never be an easy read to the traumatised, it has the potential of becoming your favourite literary catharsis.

If that's caught your attention, let me jump forward to 2023 where the majority of the book takes place. Choi Myeong-ju is a victim too, but she escaped her abuser, who was her husband. He chose violence with increasing ease and she got away from him by jumping off the balcony of the second floor apartment they lived in. She secured a divorce and started running. She's still running when she finds a dead body stuffed into a storm drain and calls the police.

Forensics are rather confused, because they can't reconstruct the crime logically. The victim, who was male, received a fatal blow elsewhere and was then moved to the drain, where he was set on fire, so effectively burned alive. However, there are no footprints and no evidence whatsoever of a killer. It's as if the victim did this to himself, while also posing in prayer, with some floral foam in his mouth and a couple of tree branches in his hand, perhaps held up in the form of a cross.

This particular victim, who is the first of many to follow this template, is quickly identified as Kim Jong-gu and the capable police figure out that he's an abuser. They talk with his former girlfriend, Bae Kyeong-shin, who had reported him for stalking, and figure out that he was blackmailing her. He had a trio of hidden cameras in his room and, after she left him, he used footage from them as blackmail material. She clearly isn't the killer, but she says that she never told anyone about what was happening, only a presence in a recurring dream.

That's the first hint of supernatural activity and we're almost a quarter of the way in. Instead, we have followed some capable but routine police procedural work and started to realise that maybe there's a violence against women problem in South Korea. The story grows and the bodies mount, but every successive revelation only underlines the scale of that problem. Each of the victims was an abuser and most of them were victims themselves, signifying generational abuse. Sometimes that can prompt just a little sympathy in us but here it emboldens the word "systematic".

In fact, the focus here isn't just on abusers but abusers who either got away with their crimes or at least were merely slapped on the wrist for them. Oh Yu-jin was beaten into a coma on the subway by drunken medical students given probation after regretting their actions. Jeong-ya's boyfriend served only three years for her murder. One victim was a lawyer who defended sex offenders; he got a former pro basketball player a suspended sentence for making kiddie porn. Another served a single year for raping a minor.

It seems that not only are men violent to women in Korea, whether physically and/or sexually, but the system appears to be on their side. Victim shaming is frequent. And there's another term that sees use here: "don't ask why" crimes, which are called "mudjima" in Korean. They're inexplicable acts of violence that target strangers; while they don't appear to be specifically aimed at women, this trawls the term into that context and the broader issue. Of course, public outrage erupts with each such instance and, when details about the victims come to light, often through evidence left for the police, the public starts to get behind the killer. At least something is being done.

If you're wondering where the vampire or literary horror angles are coming in, given that there's such a strong focus on social commentary and police procedural, then I should point out that even if  Kim Bohyun doesn't tell us outright that it's Geun-hong behind all this, they drop some pretty blatant hints and the back cover blurb does likewise. The suggestion is that this fifty-one-year-old grandma is also killed in the attack that claimed her daughter's life and she's buried, but she also wakes up on the mountain top where she was spreading Jeong-ya's ashes and decides to seek her revenge.

Beyond that, how we read this is open to interpretation. It gets strange towards the end, shifting this firmly into horror, into allegory, even into science fiction. Has this epidemic reached a critical mass and evolved into something more palpable? That's one way to read this. Another is closer to the approach of 'The Night is Not for You', though it riffs on it from a slightly different angle. The straightforward vampire approach is valid too and we could even ditch the supernatural element entirely and read it as a serial killer narrative. I don't buy that though. We might be able to argue over what the supernatural element is but I'm not sure we can argue that there isn't one.

There's an awful lot of depth here and I haven't even touched on a whole slew of smaller details of note. In fact, I haven't even introduced most of the characters. There's an ensemble cast, many of whom are given their own chapters that unfold from their perspectives, and they cover a swathe of different angles around this issue. In fact, some connect in more than one fashion For example, the detective working the Kim Jong-gu crime scene is Noh Jin-seon; her father, Noh Cheol-kyeong, was the detective who investigated the attack on Jeong-ya and Geun-hong in the prologue. If he wasn't suffering from dementia, maybe he could have helped his daughter.

I could throw out a dozen more characters and a dozen more highlights but none of them count to a larger degree than the overriding theme. That's what's going to matter here and it matters an awful lot. I hope this is read deeply and widely. ~~ Hal C F Astell