I devoured A Plagued Sea, by Kim Bo-Young, translated by Sophie Bowman, in one sitting, just a couple of hours. It’s fairly short, but it packs in a lot of emotion, events, and (mostly local) worldbuilding. It’s a Korean horror story that combines illness, body horror, and the things that people do to each other, with family love and guilt.
From the NetGalley summary: TVs throughout the station report breaking news of a massive earthquake on the eastern coast. Despite the danger, Muyoung boards the train with her niece … That choice haunts her for the rest of her life. Three years later, Haewon Village is home to horrors. The earthquake unleashed an ancient plague that transforms its victims … and the government’s lockdown has cut off any hope for help. Muyoung’s niece is dead, and all that’s left for her is to hunt villagers who break isolation. When an officious bureaucrat from Seoul arrives in the village, he stirs up even deeper trouble. Will Muyoung survive? Does she even deserve to?
Muyoung leads a sad, lonely life. She’s full of regrets, and she doesn’t even get to visit her niece’s gravesite, since the hospital won’t release plague victims’ bodies to their families for burial. Her one semi-friend is a woman she met just before the train trip, and the friend spends most of her time tending to her disfigured, ailing, (formerly?) abusive spouse. But Muyoung at least has something to do: helping the police to enforce quarantine on the severely afflicted. It’s not something she feels great about, nor do the villagers like her for it, but it seems necessary. Unfortunately, there’s no help coming; government resources are dwindling, and outside media reports blame the villagers for their misfortunes, painting them as dirty and antisocial.
When an outsider arrives, wanting to do research and tell the world about what’s happening, Muyoung dutifully warns him to save himself by going back. But life has always gone his way, and he refuses to believe that he will catch the plague and be forced to stay. Other unusual events start to happen, and Muyoung goes with the tide for a while, before realizing that she will have some crucial choices to make about whom to help and how.
I really enjoy the pacing in this book, with a lot of mournful musings punctuated by (intentionally) frustrating conversations and exciting action scenes. Kim’s depiction of unsympathetic government and media, while gloomy, seems spot on; on the other hand, the villagers turn out to be much more open and accepting (or at least desperate) than initially thought. I don’t read Korean, but the translator did an excellent job of choosing words that make Muyoung’s gray limbo-life immediate and engaging, and giving later confrontations and revelations the appropriate urgency.
MINOR SPOILERS: I wasn’t expecting what happened in this book. Or rather, I was initially struck by some similarities to a much older horror novella, but dismissed them as a fancy or perhaps a brief homage. Later in the story, I became sure that it was much more than that, as the author’s own take on that Lovecraft tale, transplanted to her own culture, and seen through a far kinder lens. Muyoung isn’t an insider like Aphra in Ruthanna Emrys’ Winter Tide et alia, but she gains a sympathetic perspective after some revelations.
In the afterword, an “Author’s Note to the Korean Edition,” Kim explains about being invited to write as part of a Lovecraft Reanimated project, and her feelings and questions that arose as she read about cosmic horror, and thought about the differences between helplessness and powerlessness. It’s well worth reading; don’t skip it, but don’t skip ahead to it, either.
A Plagued Sea, by Bo-Young Kim, was published in Korea in 2020. The English translation will be issued on Aug. 11 but is available for preorder now. 112 pages, or 3 hours 11 minutes.
Content warnings: Disaster, epidemic, illness, body horror, domestic abuse, violence, murder (?), isolation, transformation.
Comparisons: The Shadow Over Innsmouth, by H.P. Lovecraft; The Litany of Earth, by Ruthanna Emrys.
Disclaimer: I received a free eARC for review from the publisher via NetGalley.
