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No More Damsels in Distress: Women Protagonists Redefining Thriller and Horror scrap download

비련의 여주인공은 가라! 스릴러와 호러 이끄는 여성들

Korean society has always been violent and cruel to women. While male chauvinism prevails worldwide, the Korean patriarchy rooted in Confucianism is particularly harsh, as evidenced by the fact that most of the unjustly murdered ghosts in Korean folk tales are women. However, even the women who become ghosts that scare the life out of us are, in fact, “sad girls in need of a Prince Charming.” It is always a man of high status who resolves the problem that has caused the ghosts’ anger and sorrow, and male chauvinism dominated Korean women’s desire even until recently.


In the West, on the other hand, a woman from mythology abandoned all her filial duty and maternal love for her children and brandished her rage as brutally as any male villain. Medea, a princess of Colchis, fell in love with the Greek hero Jason at first sight and betrayed her father. After she married Jason, she had her two daughters tear her uncle into pieces to throne her husband. But when the king of Corinth, where they were in exile, offers Jason his throne on the condition that he marry his daughter, Jason accepts and abandons Medea, which unleashes her fury. She poisons Jason’s new wife, sets fire to the Corinthian palace, and kills her and Jason’s two sons with her own hands.


The novels we introduce here are not as brutal as Medea, who evolves from a lover into the “revenge incarnate,” but they feature strong women who are disenchanted with love and refuse to give in to or compromise with men. There emerged a new genre of “feminist family thriller” that depicts the fears and anxieties of women in a patriarchal society, featuring women who are honest about their desires, uninhibited, unharmed, and unafraid to commit bad things. With such bold ideas as “a teddy bear with a hatchet” and “a town that makes a living from serial killings,” it’s refreshing to see empowered women that are no longer just damsels in distress leading thriller and horror novels.


Abduction Day by Jeong Hai-yeon, Sigongsa (2019)


Myeongjun is a divorced man in his 30s struggling to make ends meet. A little slow-witted but with a big heart, he cherishes his young daughter, his only hope. But his daughter is sick with leukemia and requires a fortune for hospitalization and surgery. Myeongjun uses up even his rent deposit to pay for her treatment, and in the end, his ex-wife persuades him to kidnap Rohee, a girl from a wealthy family. On his way to kidnap her, he accidentally causes a car accident, and the child he runs over is the very girl he was trying to kidnap. Rohee loses her memory of the accident and thinks of Myeongjun as her father, and while Myeongjun tries to return her to her parents, the phone call doesn’t go through. When Myeongjun goes to spy on Rohee’s house, he runs into Rohee’s parents being carried out as corpses. Depicting the strange companionship between Rohee, a genius girl who eventually realizes who Myeongjun really is, and Myeongjun, a naive adult, for solving the mystery, Abduction Day was also made into a TV series.


White Horse by Kang Hwa Gil, Munhakdongne (2020)


This short story collection contains seven works, including Blessings, Gawon, and White Horse. Blessings depicts the suspenseful patriarchal power relationship experienced by a daughter-in-law attending her father-in-law’s first chesa ceremony after her marriage. Gawon tells the story of a granddaughter who discovers the secrets hidden between her cruel grandmother and her affectionate grandfather, while the title piece of the collection White Horse portrays the experiences of a writer in a slump staying in a mysterious cabin deep in the mountains. The critics of these thrillers and horror stories named them “feminist family thrillers.” Thrillers bring horror to the readers through the cognitive gap between what they know and what they don’t, but in a feminist family thriller, it is the gender-based power difference that drives the gap in perception. The fact that women prepare food for the dead and share food left over from the ghosts with the whole family for blessings is a thriller or horror in and of itself; isn’t the daily life of women living under the violence of patriarchy a thriller, the author asks.


Burning Heart by Lee Doo-on, ehbook (2020)


What if there is a town that made a living off of serial killings? A small rural village across a barren, arid plain realizes that serial killings are quite lucrative and holds a festival to showcase murder cases. The town used to be a rest stop for truck drivers, but after a highway had been constructed, drivers simply passed through, depriving the town of its main source of income. But when six bodies are found on the plains, the small town becomes famous as the site of serial murders, attracting countless visitors. The town’s annual festival turns into a psychotic tourist attraction showcasing the murders. Just as the frenzy of murder tourism is beginning to wane, a new murder occurs, and a young girl risks her life to find the killer. The novel unfurls a dark and dreamy story of a town corrupted by the need to make a living.


Teddy Bears Never Die by Cho Yeeun, Safehouse (2023)


The time is 2025, and a massive redevelopment project completely transformed the city of Yamu. Three years ago, nine people were killed after consuming poisoned rice cakes in a terrorist attack on a high-end apartment complex. Hwayeong, a young girl who lost her mother in the incident, sets a goal of earning 20 million won to avenge the death. Living in a dingy apartment building with a nickname “Yamu’s drain hole” for cheap rent, Hwayeong is blackmailed into taking part in “fishing” for money using youth like herself as baits, but it is not until she ends up in an inn that she realizes she isn’t a bait for a robbery but a victim of human trafficking. It is none other than a teddy bear that saves Hwayeong from a near-death crisis—it swings a hatchet at a man and brings him down! The bear, which her mother used to put together as her side job, is now possessed by Doha, a boy Hwayeong’s age who has lost his body. Hwayeong and Doha help each other as they embark on an adventure in search of hope and a happy ending.


To Paradise with Pale Hands by Park Young, ehbook (2023)


Yeon-woo is a police officer who gets urgently dispatched to a murder case in the port city of Sunyang, Gangwon-do, on the first day of the new year. He is accompanied by his former partner and his junior, Sang-hyuk. The case victim is Dr. Cha Yo-han, the director of Eden General Hospital, whom the locals trusted and respected. Strangely, Dr. Cha was scheduled to terminate his life-sustaining treatment that day; he had been brutally murdered just hours before his planned death. Meanwhile, Do-jin, a lawyer and the son of Dr. Cha, is requested to defend Yoo Min-hee, a nurse who has become a suspect in the murder. He travels back against his will to his hometown of Sunyang where he pledged never to return, as he is threatened with revealing the truth of a case 15 years ago if he refuses to defend her. Only when Do-jin arrives in Sunyang does he realize his father is the victim. What happened in the city 15 years ago on “that day?”


Written by Choi Jaebong


Choi worked as a literary journalist at the Hankyoreh newspaper from 1992 to 2022. He has written books such as Inquiry: How Writers Work, Stories Live Long, Writers of the Mirror World, and translated works such as Elegy for Earth, Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews, and Journey to the beginning (Egar Snow’s memoir). After retiring in 2022, he has been working as a freelance senior journalist, writing articles on literature and publishing.


Translated by Joheun Lee joheunlee@gmail.com


Joheun Lee (Jo) is a literary translator from Korea. She was selected in the 2023 and 2024 Translation Academy Night Courses from LTI Korea, the American Literary Translators Association's inaugural Building Our Future workshop for emerging BIPOC translators, and the 2023-24 National Centre for Writing's Emerging Translator Mentorship for Korean-English translation.

A long-time fan of K-pop and many other subcultures, she finds herself drawn to works on related topics and speculative fiction, especially by women and queer writers. A UX Designer by day, Jo now lives with her partner and three cats in Shanghai, China.

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