All three books were published by Honford Star in October 2025 — two novellas and a graphic novel. The first book is Lee Suhyeon’s ‘Alien Gods’, translated by Anton Hur. Then we have Yi Seoyoung’s ‘Come Down to a Lower Place’, and a graphic novel with Choi Jaehoon’s ‘The Call of the Friend’. The second novella and graphic novel are translated by Janet Hong.
I had to patiently wait for the books to be done in the reservations queue before getting them. Luckily I could begin with the first book proper, so to speak.
‘Alien Gods’ by Lee Suhyeon
It’s a very short story standing at 47 pages. It'd question your entire beliefs about life and your sanity. Graduate student Kim Minsuh is an anthropology student. She researches shamanistic rituals and the mudangs who perform them. She values logic and rarionlity. She has dismissed the supernatural her whole life. She remembered her mother going crazy and attended to by a mudang-shaman.
Then she’s afflicted with a mysterious shinbyeong— a holy sickness unique to Korea. She doesn’t know if she’s stressed, depressed and losing her mind or is genuinely stricken by spirit sickness inexplicable to modern medicine. She couldn’t explain her nightmares or why she was cleaning house and moving furniture at night. She thought she had rats in the house, and there was a strange smell in a manner similar to a Forbidden House she was researching. She is forced to turn to a mudang…. Im Gyeongja, the Manshin-nim. In the end, she somehow set fire to said Forbidden House, and a pile of bodies was unearthed in her frenzy of digging. In her memories, Gyeongja Manshin saved her, but nobody remembers such a woman ever existed, even Hwang, who had introduced her to the manshin denied it ever happened and thought she was going bonkers.
I was never a gullible person. I was always a skeptic and was trained to look at things from as many angles as possible. I was rational to the point of being cynical, and convinced I was good at accepting what people normally hated to accept. I thought a logically, rationally, and as neatly as possible to restore order to my worldview; I tried to think that way so many times I almost made myself vomit. I tried to think that the therapist was right, that the manshin was too close to my ideal to be real, that I must've made her up because I'd felt so fragile.
The second novella has 49 pages. I laughed so badly at this storyline. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. It’s so bad that it’s actually decent.
It’s like a whole spectrum of gynecological issues that became a demon and left vaginal discharge all over. It also criticized the chauvinistic overbearing patriarchal hierarchy of society and the work space.
A woman named Lee Seul works as a project manager in a construction company. She takes on a new project at Saesegae, a luxury mall in Myeongdong in downtown Seoul. There was a foul stench coming up from the basement, and she was tasked to seal it over, not to investigate the cause of it.
On a personal note, Seul also has a pungent vagina discharge that she can't seem to rid. It affects her in terms of her self-confidence in romantic relationships and men who made fun of her ‘smell’. She feels disrespected, even by her current boyfriend Jungyu.
Now that stench in the basement of Saesegae mall. Apparently 84 years ago, the floor was made thicker, and renovation was done to turn it from Mitsukoshi Department Store to Saesegae. In that renovation, the crew who worked on layering the floor thicker went crazy and died. Something happened in there but no one seemed to have recorded the details.
Of course during the renovation works this time, the monster appeared too. The difference is, a woman is present, instead of an all-male crew. We have the usual rambling old man who knew what happened in the past. The monster is named Bin-o-jae. It is the host of all vengeful spirits who happened to be female, and stinks like menstrual blood and vaginal discharge and yeast infections. Instead of Cthulhu, we have Bin-o-jae, with tentacles too. Really! Well, it’s similar in the sense that both are caricatures of the human form; cosmic entities who exist underground. But they are starkly different.
And so in contemporary Seoul, Seul becomes the human host of Bin-o-jae. And I don’t know how or what it will eventually do. Contemporary misogyny and chauvinistic aside, the story is quite horrifying because this 'malady' affects everyone. We care about how we look at ourselves and how we perceive others to think of us. We do care to a large extent, how we are seen by the public. And how much we are willing to go to maintain this perceived image versus the real us.
Instead of sticking out, the suckers inside her body were pulling from within. There was a strange sensation — a mix of calm and pain. Without realizing it, Seul glanced at Jungyu’s crotch. It wasn’t her doing; it was the suckers. They were hungry, feeding her all sorts of painful memories. She soothed them quietly. Just a little longer, just a little more. Feeling the comforting pain, Seul returned to the fitting room to try on the second dress. Jungyu probably wouldn’t be as excited about this one.As she unzipped the dress, Seul whispered, “Don’t worry, just a little longer, Bin-o-jae. Before long, I’ll fully welcome you inside me — and the destruction to come.”Suddenly, Bin-o-jae’s sucker spewed a thick white discharge from her vagina.
This book is presented as a graphic novel. It holds only ten pages. Reading it on the phone is impossible. It's too small. The iPad works, but it's not as nice to read it on the iPad as opposed to flipping a hard copy.
University student Jingu hasn't turned up for classes or been seen in school for a bit. His classmate Wonjun went to his home to check on him.
Jingu was in depression from new of the death of Jaeyeon, a K-Pop trainee under one of those draconian management agencies. She had taken her own life. What Wonjon didn't know is, Lee Jaeyeon is Jingu's big sister. In this story, Jaeyoen is under an agency named O.Y.M. Next thing we know, the CEO of O.Y.M also killed himself. Then Jingu went missing.
He wanted to know what Wonjon had said about his sister, and her relationship with the CEO of the agency. And poor Wonjun, seemingly innocent, but not exactly so because he did say something about Jaeyeon, was totally bemused, and yes, felt guilty.
We live in a complex society with different unspoken rules when it comes to social media. What is deemed okay and acceptable by a segment of people, might not be seen as such by another. It's a minefield navigating even whether to post your friends' photos on social media, depending on how they look, dress or what they're doing, and what the context is. Words can drive someone to suicide. It's... complicated.
I have no comments about the quality of the drawings. I'm not an artist. As long as the feels and drawings convey what the story is, that's a decent graphic novel. As illustrations, I see it as black and white on the iPad. The light and shadows and negative space interplay to lend the gloom and doom conveyed in this story.
There was an 'Afterword' by author Choi Jaehoon. He mused about the concept of fear, sins, guilt and daily life, and how some people live a life of violence, while others don't even use curse words.
While I didn't want the theme to be too obvious in this story, I hoped readers would be able to tangibly experience Wonjun's guilt. These long, nocturnal reflections on our current human condition, set against H.P. Lovecraft's world of unexplained fears, have prompted me to contemplate the words we've spoken, the conflict and guilt we've endured, as well as the subsequent death and fear they cause. My goal was to depict these emotions with as much depth as possible.
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