TL;DR: The vampire is the least disturbing thing here. Kim Bohyun’s Mothersucker is built like a police procedural and cuts like a court transcript: exact, unsparing, arranged so the dread comes from the paperwork. I have not read another horror novel that trusts its structure this much. A highlight of the year.

The first body is found by a woman who took up running after her divorce. She used a free app. One minute running, two minutes walking, five times, then the walk home. It took her twenty-four attempts to run thirty minutes without stopping. On the morning in question she has been dreaming about her ex-husband standing under a streetlight, and she runs until she is somewhere she does not recognize, in a yellow haze of fine dust beside a stalled apartment construction site in Pajeong, where a small dog with a ruptured eye is barking at a storm drain. The dog’s vocal cords have been removed. It barks anyway. Inside the drain is a man burned black, kneeling, forehead to the ground, hands clasped, two branches of different lengths under the hands, mouth packed with floral foam.

That is chapter one. Chapter zero is half a page long and belongs to a woman named Geum-hong, who is on her kitchen floor watching her daughter die by the knife she peels potatoes with.

Mothersucker (the Korean title is Bloody Mother, which is less of a joke and more of a description) is Kim Bohyun’s first book in English, translated by Archana Madhavan. It runs about two hundred pages in thirty-eight short chapters, then two more, then an epilogue. Every chapter in the first part is headed with a year and a name. 2023, Jin-seon. 2017, Geum-hong. 2023, Eliza. 1969, Geum-hong. There is a cast list at the front with twenty-eight names on it and the words “murder victim” after six. Many of the names belong to women who appear for one chapter, find a body, and go. The title tells you what the killer is and the jacket tells you the rest of the premise. What the book withholds is everything else.

Here is the book this could have been. A grieving mother comes up out of the ground with fangs and a pair of pruning shears and works her way down a list of stalkers, blackmailers, lenient judges, and men who film women in bathrooms, and each one dies worse than the last, and the detective on the case is a woman who slowly comes around, and there is a scene near the end where the two of them face each other across a room and something is understood. That book exists. It is on the front table and it is fine. Kim spends a third of her pages on its apparatus (the National Forensic Service, a special investigation unit, a director who objects to the media’s name for the case because hwa means fire and hyeong means punishment and the police cannot be seen to agree) and the other two thirds on the people that book would have used as set dressing.

Those people are the point. Kyeong-shin, a bank teller, lets a tab of Xanax dissolve on her tongue outside the police station before an interview about the man who kept her compliant for months with hidden-camera footage. When she reported him, the officer asked her why she thought this had happened to her. Ga-in hikes alone on peaks with ak in the name, because those are the hard ones, and spends her Sundays beside a hospital bed where her partner has been asleep for seventy-two days after some medical students on the subway decided to find out whether she was male or female. Eliza, a farmer’s wife from the Philippines whose name in Korea became Lee-ja, which sounds like a piece of her husband’s name and a piece of her mother-in-law’s and an incomplete version of her own, walks a full circle around her village with a fever before dawn and finds what is caught in the boar trap. A janitor at the forensic hospital holds the hand of the first friend she ever made, who is a patient there. Each of them gets one chapter, written in the same close, undecorated third person, and the chapter does not explain her. She finds the body, or the trap, or the window, and the chapter ends.

The police get the same economy. Jin-seon’s father was a detective too. He has dementia now and calls her “Darling” because the memory that survived is a call he made once to her mother, from a roadside, with two knives in his back. Her partner joined the force because civil servants get approved for bank loans. The medical examiner has a temporary cartoon tattoo on the back of her hand and two rules. The profiler wears a mouth guard because she grinds her teeth, and she notices that the central database keeps surfacing new cold cases every time she runs the same search, like a news portal refreshing, and she starts to say so in the briefing and stops, because it would look like she had not done her research. (This is the most frightening paragraph in the book and it takes place at a conference table.)

This is where you are supposed to feel the horror: the bodies. Burned from the skin inward with no ignition point, still breathing while it happened, soot in the airways, carbon monoxide in the blood. The book gives you one of these in full and then trusts you. What it spends its dread on instead is paperwork. A sentencing article, reproduced whole, in which the court explains that three years is appropriate because the knife was already in the victim’s home, so nothing was premeditated. The phrase “Don’t Ask Why” assault, which is what the Korean press calls an attack it would rather not assign a motive. A tip line where men who have done the same things as the victims call in and ask for protection. Kim understands that a named real thing in the wrong register is worse than anything invented, and she keeps handing you the real thing. The vampire is the least disturbing element in the novel. She is also the only one of these voices written in the first person, and the only one allowed to love anyone out loud.

Her chapters are dated out of order. 2017, 2017, 2017, 2018, 1969, 2023, 2023, 2023, 2023, 1993. The 1969 chapter is a page and a half and takes place inside her mother’s womb, where she considers wrapping the cord around her own neck so that none of it will begin, and then hears her mother start to sing. I am not going to tell you where the 1993 chapter takes place. Madhavan’s translation keeps this plain. The sentences are short, the nouns are exact (soybean paste stew, seasoned eggplant, stir-fried zucchini, fried eggs, the doorbell), and when Geum-hong’s voice breaks it breaks into a list, which I think is how the whole book is meant to work. The individual item is bearable. The catalogue is not. When the violence arrives in her own voice it is not choreographed. Bones snap, she says, unbelievably easily. She tastes a man’s fear in his blood and reports it the way she reported the eggplant. Then she looks at the sky.

Pacing. It holds. The chapters are short enough that the white space is doing half the work, and a couple of the police chapters are functionally interchangeable (someone is tired, someone drives, a phone rings), and the book turns that sameness against you in one stretch where three consecutive chapters, from three pairs of eyes, end on the same sentence. Then come the two chapters of the second part and the epilogue. I will say only that each is written in a register the book has not used before, that one of them has footnotes, and that the epilogue is called “Someday Doughnut Club,” which is in the table of contents and which I am not going to interpret.

Complaints, such as they are: the profiler is handed a paragraph of UN and Korea Women’s Hotline statistics that reads as pasted from a research folder, and a late chapter opens on eight lines of William Blake it did not need. That’s the list.

Kim Bohyun has been at this for fifteen years. She debuted in 2011 with a short story in the literary quarterly Jaeum & Moeum, then spent most of the next decade closer to film than to publishing, winning the Korea Story Contest in 2013 and 2015; the 2013 entry, a story called “Owl Boy,” became the 2022 period thriller The Night Owl. Her first novel, in 2017, was a zombie book about a nineteen-year-old fencer with a burn scar; a director had asked her for something like Warm Bodies and she wrote a coming-of-age story instead. Her second, in 2022, was a thriller about a depressed mother turned investigator; asked about it, she said she was drawn to “depressed, mad women” because they were both herself and the women she loved, and that people used to the dark see more clearly in it. Mothersucker came out in Korea in 2024 from Safehouse, expanded from a 2018 short story in the crime magazine Mysteria. She has said she belongs fully to neither world. You can feel that here. The book is built like a script (the cast list, the dated slugs, the act break) and written like a story collection, and I have not read another horror novel, lately, that trusts its arrangement this much.

Jin-seon, at the drain, wonders whether the dog barked until its eye burst out of loyalty or out of something else, and whether dogs can feel compassion. She does not say it out loud. The dog is not the victim’s. The body goes to the National Forensic Service, with the branches.