Emerald Gao is a copy editor with the Korea Times. She occasionally writes about cultural topics such as Korean literature, restaurants and gaming.
K-LIT REVIEW Loneliness connects humans, vampires in ‘Midnight Shift’
Cover of Cheon Seon-ran's "The Midnight Shift" / Courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing
By Emerald Gao
In a world with more than 8 billion people, it’s astonishing that one of the most universal experiences is loneliness. There are many ways to be alone — by leaving others behind, being left behind, ignored or cast out by others. Unlike solitude, which is often voluntary, it can transform people into monsters, turning them against each other or against the world.
That’s the kind of loneliness Cheon Seon-ran explores in “The Midnight Shift,” a novel marketed as a vampire mystery but actually an exploration of the human struggle to make connections in a world that often doesn’t seem to care.
Cheon first made her literary mark with “A Thousand Blues” (2020), which won the 4th Korea Sci-fi Literature Award and is slated for a U.S. film adaptation. “The Midnight Shift,” published in Korea in 2021 and released in English by Bloomsbury last year in a debut translation by Gene Png, reflects the author’s love of horror and was partially inspired by her mother’s stay at a convalescent hospital. Neither genre fiction nor gory thriller, readers should expect less vampire action and more quiet introspection.
The story follows three women: a detective named Suyeon investigating a string of deaths at a hospital for the elderly, a nurse named Nanju whose hard-luck past has led to some devastating decisions, and a mysterious older woman named Violette who knows a little too much about the case for Suyeon’s liking.
Suyeon and Nanju’s chapters are anchored in the present and reflect the struggles of women in modern Korean society, including casual misogyny and the burdens of caretaking. They’re both trying to get through the muck, but have ended up on very different paths to finding salvation — paths that intersect with vampires in drastically different ways.
Violette’s chapters take readers into France in the year 1983, where the Korean-born adoptee Violette grows up in solitude — until she meets a captivating young vampire named Lily. This section is both a coming-of-age story about navigating adolescent first love and an exploration of the possibilities and limits of human connection.
Vampires have a long history in Western literature and entertainment, from folktales and gothic novels toAnne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and the “Twilight” series. Korea doesn't have the same history of vampiric tales, however, which gives authors room to play outside genre conventions.
Cheon’s take on the vampire is distinct and melancholy, unmistakably influenced by modern Western archetypes — she has cited the 2008 film “Let the Right One In” as a major inspiration — while reflecting her own imagination and cultural concerns.
Author Cheon Seon-ran / Courtesy of Hubble
“Compared to other creatures who are depicted as monsters or beasts, a vampire stands like a solitary flower, and I felt the desire to reinterpret that image,” she said in an interview with The Korea Society. The vampire, she said, was the perfect figure for detecting loneliness, conveyed in her novel through the smell of blood, which is compared to “aged wine” when it hits a vampire’s heightened senses.
Her vampires hunt only for the blood of the lonely, which leads to the patients of Cheolma Rehabilitation Hospital. The connection of the necessary solitude of vampires with the loneliness of the sick, the elderly and the marginalized is one of the novel’s biggest thematic strengths.
Cheon’s vampires have their own society and their own rules, but because they are not the ones telling the story, their world is rendered in rough sketches, leaving readers with more questions than answers. Details, for example, of an extra-governmental institution that polices vampire activity, are scant. A great deal of the action — detective and vampire — happens off-page, which is occasionally frustrating.
While Cheon’s prose is sparse and unadorned, it achieves poignancy when it lets the characters’ inner voices take over. The world of vampires comes dramatically alive through Violette’s adolescent viewpoint, as she tries to make sense of her feelings and untangle the wonders of the human heart.
Perception of time is a crucial contrast between humans and vampires, thanks to the latter’s near-immortal lifespans. “If half a century for a vampire was equivalent to five years for a human being, then perhaps a memory that had faded within a human mind could still be as vivid in a vampire’s mind as though it were only yesterday,” Suyeon realizes.
For vampires, memory is a burden and every connection they make with a human being adds to the weight of loneliness they hold. But, Cheon asks us, isn’t that true for humans as well? Life is fleeting, and the desire to hold onto relationships to escape that loneliness is just as universal as loneliness itself. Without it, we become monsters. With it, we can endure almost anything.
As an old woman tells Suyeon after handing her a paper flower, “If only people could be like this flower. But there’s nothing we can do about it. Nothing that can stop us from wilting. Still, the fact that we’re only wilting because we’ve bloomed… that’s quite beautiful, isn’t it?”
Cheon offers no solutions for the wider issues that plague her characters: There is no escape from the slog of Korean society that sucks people in and doesn’t let them go, and no bridge that can erase the distance between vampires and humans, no matter how deep love and affection run. Instead, the novel serves as a plea for humanity to not let go of each other’s hands, to maintain the bonds — whether familial, social or romantic — that make us a little less lonely.
“The Midnight Shift” is available for purchase through dbBOOKS.co.kr.