Horrors!

 I start with a book review, The New Seoul Park Jelly Massacre, by Rachael Nevins from Necessary Fiction.

Cho Yeeun’s The New Seoul Park Jelly Massacre, translated from Korean by Yewon Jung, begins with the story of two lost children, Yuji and Jua. They meet at the Lost Children Center at New Seoul Park, an amusement park outside Seoul, after each has been separated from her parents. Yuji comforts Jua, who cries uncontrollably, and persuades her to leave the center so they can look for their parents themselves. After Jua and her mother are reunited, Yuji’s sorrowful jealousy of their intimacy surfaces; whereas her parents don’t seem to want even to hold her hands while walking around the park, Jua’s mother caresses and repeatedly hugs her daughter. Full of feelings she can neither name nor control, Yuji impulsively drops a jelly candy into the smoothie that Jua and her mother share.

The candy is a gift from a mysterious vendor who promises that anyone who eats the candy will “never split up” with the people they want to be with: “You’ll be inseparable for the rest of your life.” The true meaning of the vendor’s promise is revealed that evening, when everyone who has eaten the jelly melts away, merging into a grotesque, sweet and sticky mass.

Cool! Frankly, I think horror works better as a short story than a novel, and this is a series of interconnected short stories.

Who is the vendor handing out deadly candy in New Seoul Park on an extremely hot summer day? Is he in fact the devil who, Hyeongyeong asserts, does indeed exist, and “soothes our hearts” and “hands us sweet, sweet jelly in the moment of our greatest need”? His identity seems less important than the fact that people do indeed turn to him for solace. Whether the vendor’s promise of inseparability is even true is belied by one story featuring a sentient mass of jelly that lives a kind of half-life, still seeking the person they had seemed to merge with. The tuxedo cat, meanwhile, watches everything with the detached wisdom of a creature that has lived a long time. Humans, she observes, “always came and left so easily. All she could do was accept things as they were.”

Speaking of short stories, Necessary Fiction published The Killeen by Nancy Connors. No quotes, it is too short for excerpts - it hits like a freight train.

Happy Halloween!

sch 9/7