(Lovecraft enthusiasts can buy this book here.)
3 minutes read time
Mu-Young plans a relaxing beach town getaway with her niece Hyun. At first it’s a welcome respite from her controlling sister and the stresses of her job as a bodyguard, but the earthquake that hits the coast as soon as they arrive changes everything. Eldritch beings crawl from the depths of the sea, carrying a disfiguring disease that threatens to turn humans into monsters. It’s contained through harsh quarantine, but after several years, a new visitor leads Mu-Young to a heartbreaking discovery and a final attempt at freedom.
I was initially intrigued by what the author’s note promised was a Korean take on H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. I appreciated how cosmic horror was introduced in a way that seemed to omit some of Lovecraft’s less savory ideas, while keeping the grotesquerie and monstrous scares. I was even excited to see a Korean-Vietnamese woman, Mu-Young’s only friend in quarantine, portrayed richly and sympathetically.
I was less excited to see that character become the subject of one of the crueler moments of body horror in the book, in a nastily symbolic, sexualized way. I didn’t love how the horror slowly became less cosmic and more about the fear of weird looking outsiders with a strange language genetically infiltrating a pure country, starting with immigrants and enabled by clueless progressive intellectuals who change their minds after firsthand experience. I cheered when Mu-Young, strong and resolute as she is, ultimately ventures into the sea to confront an offshore menace and then winced a bit as her moment of awesome consisted entirely of telling it to go back to where they came from.
(Note; I do know that telling the being from beyond to return is a Lovecraftian, genre-accurate bit of adventure. That’s exactly the problem. Or rather, how it’s portrayed is.)
I’m sure there are cultural nuances I’m missing. There’s a lens needed to fully understand everything in this book that I almost certainly don’t have. If you don’t think about it too much, this is pitch-perfect Korean Cthulhu horror that doesn’t shy away from the really good, gross scares and has a bad-ass heroine.
But you know how sometimes a book feels like it’s telling you something uncomfortable that the author didn’t actually intend? Yeah, that.
Lovecraft would be proud, is all I’m saying. That might not be a good thing.
A…I dunno, a really big pointy boat? to A Plagued Sea.
Thank you to Netgalley and Tor for the ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
(Fellow readers! This is one of those books that seems like it would be quite interesting as either a)part of a deeper study on neo-Lovecraftian horror b)a fun casual read if you’re the type of person who doesn’t care about or acknowledge that fiction imparts deeper social and political meaning or c)a cautionary case study for those who think that it’s enough to just retell stories from the colonial canon if you want to break into foreign markets. I found this a little disappointing, If you want to read horror from a diverse perspective, check out I Am The Monster: Horror by #ownnormal Writers on the Equal Opportunity Bookshop. If you buy something from a link on this site, a commission is paid to me, which I use to buy charms to keep the fish-monster under the bed at bay. Now, go and read something good. Peace!)
