FICTION
SEVEN YEARS OF DARKNESS
By Jeong You-jeong, translated by Kim Chi-young Penguin Books/ Paperback/ 338 pages/ $29.43/ Available at bit.ly/7YearsDark_Jeong
4 Stars
Jeong You-jeong is indisputably South Korea's queen of crime thrillers and she lives up to this billing in Seven Years Of Darkness.
The atmospheric noir thriller, her third of five novels to date and the second to be translated into English, was originally published in Korean in 2011.
It is translated by Kim Chi-young, who had also translated Jeong's The Good Son (2019), a story about a psychopath which is by far one of the most disturbing novels this reviewer has read.
Jeong's writing likewise packs a punch in Seven Years Of Darkness.
She wields a deft hand in navigating such dark themes as domestic violence, child abuse, animal abuse, alcoholism, inequality and the psychological trauma of having one's lifelong dreams shattered.
The book starts with a tragedy at the fictional Seryong Lake seven years ago, in which Choi Hyonsu, a failed baseball athlete turned head of security at the dam, opened the floodgates and drowned the whole village.
His motives had never been clear to his son Sowon, now 18, whose admiration for his father has turned into hatred, as he is ostracised by others for being associated with a crook on death row.
The past he has tried to bury keeps returning to haunt him - the work of relentless paparazzi or perhaps something more sinister.
What had set off the series of unfortunate events was the death of 11-year-old Oh Seryong in a hit-and-run accident.
Her father Yongje, a dentist and sociopath who had beaten her until her teeth fell out on the night of her death, plots his revenge against the culprit behind his daughter's death.
This slow burn of a novel flits between graphic scenes of abuse seven years apart, with Sowon discovering the truth only on the eve of his father's execution.
Jeong has made Hyonsu someone with whom you can empathise, for all his faults. He feels real, as someone who has an inferiority complex due to his past failures but who also shows tenderness towards his son.
"They say a cat can sense thunder right before it rumbles," Jeong writes. "Perhaps the human brain has a similar sensory ability - the clock of anxiety that begins ticking when catastrophe looms."
There is a brief turn into the supernatural, which might be acceptable in Korean folklore but sticks out in the English version.
Yet this trip down the rabbit hole sparks deep contemplation of the ghosts of trauma and the twists and turns of fate.
If you like this, read: The Good Son by Jeong You-jeong, translated by Kim Chi-young (Abacus, 2019, $17.95, available at bit.ly/TheGoodSon_Jeong). Jeong takes readers on a journey into the unhinged psychopathic mind, as a young man wakes up covered in blood and finds his mother with her throat slit.
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