Every new vampire novel is a reason to celebrate, and Kim Bohyun’s Mothersucker, translated from Korean by Archana Madhavan, is a punchy, gory and meaningful addition to the genre.
Mothersucker is violent from the outset: A mother is brutally attacked by her daughter’s boyfriend in her own home, and forced to watch as the young man murders her daughter. This scene of horrific domestic abuse is the trunk from which the novel branches, in tone, plot and theme.
After that first scene, the novel follows various women as they discover the bodies of men all over South Korea. Each body is stabbed and burned, with bite marks in their necks suggesting the killer drank their blood. As the bodies stack up, Detective Jin-seon, assigned to tracking down the killer, notices a pattern in the victims. They all committed crimes against women: stalking, blackmail, rape, assault, murder. Detective Jin-seon is dedicated to finding the killer, but she, along with the Korean public, has to reckon with what it means that a serial killer—and not the justice system—is the one protecting women and exposing the men who exploited them. The novel’s triumph is that the reader is ignited to ask this question for themselves. What is justice? That the graphic and disturbing murders stop? Or that they continue?
Mothersucker jumps between many POVs. We learn Detective Jin-seon’s story and the story of her father. We learn the stories of the women who find the murder victims, each a victim of violence themselves. We also learn the ongoing story of the mother whose daughter was killed in the beginning; we walk with her through despair, rage and, ultimately, redemption. These perspectives accumulate to impress upon the reader the breadth and severity of Korea’s festering problem with gender-based violence. Mothersucker is an unflinching rally cry against a long-ignored issue. With empathy and creativity, it fuses the horror of the supernatural with an absolutely real horror that creeps, hunts and devours society.