Mothersucker – review

Author: Kim Bohyun

Translator: Archana Madhavan

First published: 2024, 2026 (Eng translation)

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: A chilling Korean revenge novel, blending crime and horror, about a mother whose grief transforms her into a murderous bloodsucker and the detective on her trail, for fans of Kanae Minato, Cheon Seon-ran, and Yoko Ogawa A male victim, posing as if in prayer, burnt beyond recognition but otherwise intact. No traces of the assailant.

Detective Jin-seon Noh is called to the scene but soon discovers this case is unlike anything she's seen before. The man was killed with startling force and drained of his blood. Jin-seon learns that the victim had recently been accused of stalking his ex-girlfriend, and as more men turn up murdered, a pattern begins to emerge: all of these men are guilty of heinous crimes against women.

Buried underneath a mound of soil on a mountain top, Geum-hong had woken up transformed. Now her senses are vivid, she has phenomenal strength, and her appetite is deadly. The last thing she can recall of her old life is grief. Before losing consciousness, she'd been scattering the ashes of her only daughter, who was brutally murdered by her ex-boyfriend. Geum-hong has no idea how long she's been simmering beneath the earth, in fact, the confines of linear time no longer mean much to her. All she knows is that despite her transformation, her rage remains... As Jin-seon falls deeper into the case and more impossible details emerge, she can't silence the question creeping into the back of her mind: would it really be right to thwart this dealer of dark justice? Leaping between a diverse cast of female perspectives, MOTHERSUCKER is a propulsive, lacerating exploration of power and bigotry, which examines the monsters that make us and the monsters we become.

The review: A Korean novel, Mothersucker has such a fabulous concept at its heart, and this review is going to very much spoil it (though the blurb did much of that also). Part police procedural, part incisive feminist allegory, this was a particularly wonderful read. Men are being found killed, their mouths sealed with floral foam, their throats pierced on one side by gardening shears and bitten with their blood drained and burned – though the ignition point is not detectable. Often with a pair of sticks in their hands. The men have one thing in common, they somehow abused a woman through domestic violence, assault, stalking, blackmail, or harassment and their punishment seemed weak, if at all.

The police fear they have a serial killer on their hands but they start discovering older cases and then it seems that cases just appear in the files, where they hadn’t been there before. The blurb describes the vampire, Geum-hong, though it takes quite some time in the novel before an investigator uses the V word, and also mentions about her standing outside linear time. This was the astounding aspect, the fact that as a vampire she stood outside normal chronology being pulled – we later discover – by the anguished cries of wronged women into another time after time and avenging the woman. After killing the victim (and if she had quenched her thirst with them, as it wasn’t always the case) she would pull them into the dawn, in which they would burn. The fact that she is moving in time is why cases appear in the files that hadn’t seemed to be there earlier - making the investigation a thing of linear time. Geum-hongh’s daughter was killed by her boyfriend and in this the vampirism is very much a monster born of monstrous acts, a revenge made manifest.

A great read, I highly recommend this one.

9 out of 10.

In Paperback @ Amazon US

In Paperback @ Amazon UK