FICTION
THE ONLY CHILD
By Mi-ae Seo, translated by Yewon Jung
Oneworld Publications/ Paperback/304 pages/$27.82/ Available here
3 Stars
Are serial killers the product of nature or nurture?
Author Mi-ae Seo, an award-winning thriller writer in her native South Korea, seeks to explore this weighty issue in The Only Child, her first novel to be translated into English for a global audience.
Criminal psychologist Yi Seonkyeong, who teaches the subject at a university despite a lack of experience in the field, finds her personal and professional worlds colliding in this page-turner of a novel.
She learns that a 34-year-old convicted serial killer, Yi Byeongdo (of no relation), who is on death row, has specifically requested to be interviewed by her, having refused to speak to anyone else.
The police know he was behind the gruesome murders of 13 women over three years, but suspect there were other victims.
That same day, Seonkyeong's doctor husband, Yun Jaeseong, takes his 11-year-old birth daughter from his previous marriage, Hayeon, home.
Hayeon had been living with her maternal grandparents after her mother's death, until a suspicious early-morning fire razed their wooden apartment and left her the sole survivor.
Seonkyeong, who suddenly finds her life turned upside-down, shows an inability to adapt to the changes and, surprisingly for a psychologist who is supposed to be able to read other people, reacts in ways that are self-centred and emotional.
She finds herself swayed, almost flirtatiously, by Byeongdo who with his "soft, wavy hair, fair skin and regular features made for a favourable impression".
She imposes her will on Hayeon, overlooking the needs of a child in trauma by, among other things, tossing the dirty teddy bear she regards as her emotional support into the washing machine without so much as asking.
The novel's numerous references to psychological horror film The Silence Of The Lambs (1991) and its protagonist Clarice Starling only served to raise expectations that fall startlingly short in The Only Child.
But Seo shines in her depiction of her characters, especially Byeongdo, whose first memory was that of his single mother abusing him and whose body bears the scars of persistent lashings.
The chirpy Beatles tune Maxwell's Silver Hammer, which was the soundtrack to Byeongdo's abuse, would form the soundtrack to his killings.
And his loose grip on reality makes for a compelling read.
"I shouldn't have gone in, even if the locks were open. But curiosity got the better of me and I went inside. And I realised. That I had opened the door to hell," he says.
Seonkyeong eventually cottons on to the many similarities between her adult and youth charges, who give the novel a creepy, underlying tension that leaves readers unwittingly bracing themselves.
There are graphic scenes of waterboarding, stabbings and mutilated animals, and of the serene methodological calmness behind serial killers who have become immune to death.
Seo leaves many unanswered questions - including the fire that razed Hayeon's home, which was probed as part of a series of fires in the neighbourhood that were never revisited after the first chapter - before the sledgehammer of an ending.
But perhaps this was the writer's intent in bringing her readers on an emotional roller coaster: Victims never get a tidy ending.
If you like this, read: The Devotion Of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino (Abacus, 2012, $19.94, available here). The award-winning novel by the prolific Japanese writer follows detective Kusanagi as he is confronted by the genius of a mysterious crime unlike any other.
