* A narrative about ‘monsters’ in our time, where the boundary or category of the evil is unclear.

“The monster lives within us – Century of Horror, a novel by Baek Minsuk”

- Yonhap News November 27, 2016

“Fury and horror in an apocalyptic world”

- Hankyoreh, December 1, 2016

“A society of unpredictable horror . . . You too can become evil.”

-  DongA Daily, December 3, 2016

“Monster of our time, the horror of its formless voice”

- Joongdo Daily, December 1, 2016

What should we do if a scary creature creeps up on us one day and follows us both in dream and reality? This novel about people who are either born as monsters or who become them starts at the turn of the new millennium. Beginning with a story of a young man named Moby who comes to commit a cruel robbery, the novel lets us stare at the origin of an evil deed through the process and background of an abominable cruelty.

The five other characters, Gyeong, Shim, Ryeong, Hyo, and Su, who had hitherto led ordinary lives, suddenly act as if seized by demons, acting weird and committing crimes spontaneously. They are forced to have their tongues tattooed, and reveal themselves as “monsters” of the new century with the sign of “tongues of fire.” They are not much different from other ordinary people in a society whose little everyday angers pile up on top of each other, but after obtaining the “tongues of fire,” they commit terrorist acts upon their targets regardless of place or time.

The reason for this enmity is not clear, and neither is the border between good and evil. The horror is invisible, without any substance, seemingly existing but intangible, yet apparently an incarnation of evil. Something unable to be grasped by the reason and science of the modern world. Moby, the central figure of the novel, is in this way revealed as an Anti-Christ.

The author seems to say that the motif of evil expresses the chaotic modern world, a world that is no longer one of a harmonious cosmos, or the daily grind of trying to survive in the modern urban Korean rat-race, or something more fundamental. In the “modern” world, there are no more Jean Valjeans, there are only conditions of evil in us. Today, where the boundary between good and evil is hard to discern, the world is not controlled by one great power. In a spiritually apocalyptic world, unable to be controlled by anything, the risk of turning evil at any time is just another horror conveyed by Century of Horror.

Baek Minsuk

Born in 1971 in Seoul, Baek Minsuk studied Creative Writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. He made his literary debut in 1995 with the story “Candy, Whom I Loved,” published in Literature and Society, a literary journal. He wrote and published seven books in eight years after that, only to suddenly disappear from the literary scene. After a decade-long silence, he came back and has been writing and publishing.

He has published Believe It or Not Compendium and The Errand Boy at the Manor, both collections of short stories, as well as several novels such as Hey, We’re Going on a Picnic; Candy, Whom I Loved (an expansion of the earlier short story); Poor Boy Hans; Cotton Field Bizarre Story; Rusher; and A Farm for Dead Owls, among others.

He received the Kim Hyeon Literary Plaque for novels in 2018.