Korean-American author Kat Cho grew up with myths of goblins, reapers and nine-tailed fox spirits, but it was her love for South Korean dramas that helped her turn these folktales into best-selling young adult (YA) novels.
"My parents had bought my sister and me a couple of Korean folktale books," says Cho, 34, over Skype from Brooklyn. "But it was something that I never really thought I could talk to other people about, because the imagery and culture weren't very familiar to my friends who weren't Korean."
K-dramas, especially those that take traditions and twist them as modern-day retellings, showed her otherwise.
Cho burst onto the YA fantasy scene last year with her debut novel Gumiho: Wicked Fox, about Gu Mi-young, a teenager in modern-day Seoul who is secretly a gumiho, or nine-tailed fox, who must suck out a man's life force every full moon to survive.
Mi-young tries to kill only men guilty of terrible crimes and keeps a low profile, until she saves the life of a boy, Ji-hoon, and falls in love with him, defying the will of her centuries-old mother.
Cho recently released her second novel, Dokkaebi: Vicious Spirits, which spent three weeks on The Straits Times bestseller list.
In it, Ji-hoon's pragmatic best friend So-min must band together with Junu, a dashing, amoral dokkaebi, or goblin, whom she dislikes, to repair a rift between the worlds of the living and the dead.
On a family vacation to Seoul, Cho was struck by the mix of old and new. "I loved how, in one neighbourhood, you're around these hanok (old Korean houses) and the old palace, and then you walk a block in the other direction and you're in this bustling high-rise metropolis."
"It made me think what a creature who's lived throughout Korean history would feel about the city and how it's changed. I immediately thought of the gumiho, and then I just ran with the idea from there."
Her book Dokkaebi may seem to have some affinity with Goblin, the 2017 smash-hit K-drama starring Gong Yoo as the titular immortal.
Cho says she had already outlined her duology for her publisher by the time she watched Goblin. "I can't deny that I liked that K-drama," she admits. It did inspire her character Hyuk, a reaper who collects the souls of the dead and who is something of a friend to Junu in Dokkaebi.
Other K-dramas she drew on when developing her novels were high school drama School 2013 (2012-2013) and Oh My Ghost (2015), about a chef who is descended from a shaman and who gets possessed by a lustful ghost.
She would love to see her books adapted as K-dramas, she says. She already has a dream cast that includes Kim Seol-hyun from girl group AOA as Mi-young and Oh My Ghost star Park Bo-young as So-min.
If there is one thing Cho has learnt from K-dramas, it is the importance of platonic relationships. "Korean culture is all about how you fit in with the greater whole, with your family, friends and society.
"K-dramas treat familial and platonic relationships as just as important as romantic relationships and I love that they delve deep into how people care about each other."
• Gumiho: Wicked Fox ($20.87) is available here. Dokkaebi: Vicious Spirits ($20.87) is available here.
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