K-LIT REVIEW Lovecraft’s madness finds new form in 3 Korean books

The covers of "Alien Gods" by Lee Suhyeon, "The Call of the Friend" by JaeHoon Choi and "Come Down to a Lower Place" by Lee Seoyoung / Courtesy of Honford Star

Rampant delirium. Terror. Beguiling belief.

Honford Star, one of the leading publishing houses for translated speculative Korean fiction, has released three books filled with daring tales under the Lovecraft Reanimated Project. They pay tribute to the American writer H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), known for drawing from the gory bits of reality and lavishing our real world with supernatural horrors.

In this trio comprising two novellas and a graphic novel, that same Lovecraftian consciousness is dressed in the reality of modern-day Korea. In one story, a woman discovers a horrid stench coming not just from herself, but from her workplace. In another, a university student’s best friend is found greatly changed from his usual self, possessed by an ominous, shadowy blankness. The third features shamanism and an unbeliever, as denial drives a researcher into a state of shock and then to the evil beyond.

Though the month of October and its frightful attributes have come and gone, these stories let the sinister remain. Told within the Korean context, they reveal how evil lies right beneath the surface of our daily lives. What happens when the horrors break through the surface and we fall right into their clutches?

In “Come Down to a Lower Place” by Yi Seoyoung (translated by Janet Hong), a woman named Seul who works at a mall discovers a bodily odor she cannot get rid of, one that follows her to the depths of her workplace. When she goes down to the basement of the mall, she discovers an evil that has consumed not just parts of her, but the seams of reality at large. The story reflects contemporary misogyny — Seul's present and past are riddled with men that both disrespect her body and the stench along with it — and examines preconceived perceptions of how a woman's body should look and feel, scrutinizing it all through the lens of a compact horror story. In just a few dozen pages, Yi unveils the complexity of the male gaze, women’s reflexive gaze on the body and an evil that haunts and persists to this day.

“The Call of the Friend” by JaeHoon Choi (also translated by Janet Hong) depicts two university students, Wonjun and Jingu, reacting after the sudden death of a K-pop trainee. As the only graphic novel out of the three publications, most of its intrigue lies in the use of shadows and negative space, leaving monsters to lurk in every panel of the story. Eyes bulge and bodies become disfigured in a descent into darkness, a haunting depiction of how loss can consume us. In Choi's work, great streaks of faded figures and blank stares plague the book, materializing as tentacles of the great beast that houses grief.

In a nod to Lovecraftian imagery, all three books have a through line of tentacles, ones that choke and curl and squirm, ones that constrict our expectations and bring us closer to the mutated horrors of present-day Korea. They are especially prominent in the third book.

In “Alien Gods” by Lee Suhyeon (translated by Anton Hur), Minsuh, an anthropology student studying Korean shamans, holds strong prejudices that fall apart when her own rationality works against her, tearing apart her life, her flesh and more. As she longs to expose what she believes is the trickery behind Korean shamanism, her own skepticism ends up attacking her, changing her character and forcing her to reject reality as it spirals to reveal a world much larger than the one she knew. Mysticism meets the supernatural with elements of sci-fi in this rich story, with its frightful display of how our own beliefs can create a tunnel vision that blocks off other possibilities.

“Of course, I understood there was no real narrative arc to life,” our narrator Minsuh thinks in “Alien Gods,” “no cause and effect to everything. We can never comprehend the complexity of the universe; the universe is always indifferent to us, and most things happen for no good reason. There is no such thing as intrinsic meaning. We are insignificant specks of nothing. This truth is so harsh that we normally stuff it away in some corner of our lives and live our days in denial of it.”

All three stories make great use of their short length to craft horrific tales that pack a punch in the end, never failing to surprise and subvert our expectations. For most of us, what we see is what we believe. But in these stories, believing leads to unwillful perception, and the profound convictions of these characters carry them to the underbelly of evil that lurks in the heart of the world’s darkness.

All three books in the Lovecraft Reanimated Project are available for purchase from dbBOOKS.

Hailing from Los Angeles, Nathan Truong is currently based in Seoul, where he reads too many books, watches too many movies and drinks way too much coffee. You can find him at @nathansnook on YouTube.