“With her latest, Bo-Young presents a heart-wrenching fresh take on gruesome eldritch horrors with this eerily relevant tale.”
Bodyguard Mu-young receives a disaster alert on her mobile, then screens throughout the train station report a massive earthquake striking the Korean coast. Despite the impending danger, Mu-young boards the train and heads to Haewon with her niece. The situation at home isn’t ideal, and Mu-young would rather face the earthquake than leave her niece in her mother’s care.
Three years later, Mu-young is haunted by her choice. An ancient plague rose to the surface from the fissures of the earthquake. Victims of the plague have been tranformed into fishy monsters. The area is locked down by the government, squashing any hope for outside help. Mu-young’s niece is dead, and all that’s left for her to do is hunt down villagers who break isolation. Soon, an overbearing bureaucrat from Seoul arrives, stirring up even deeper troubles.
Will Mu-young survive? Does she even deserve to?
Why we’re excited about this book:
Over the past few years, Kim Bo-Young’s work has been hitting shores outside of Korea to universal acclaim. The author of The Seven Executioners, and the collections On the Origin of Species and Other Stories and I’m Waiting for You: And Other Stories, Bo-Young is the first Korean author to be published by HarperCollins, and one of the first few Korean authors to be translated into English. With her latest, Bo-Young presents a heart-wrenching fresh take on gruesome eldritch horrors with this eerily relevant tale. Hiron Ennes (Leech) says: “By turns existentially bleak, delightfully gross, and morbidly humorous, A Plagued Sea packs a great deal of cosmic horror in a small, effective package. For those of you who have been chasing the putrid high of Junji Ito’s Gyo, this is your drug.”, and Clay McLeod Chapman (Wake Up and Open Your Eyes) says: “There’s a shadow over the bookshelves with this gelatinous reimagining of Innsmouth. A Plagued Sea conjures up Lovecraftian coastal horrors while luring in fans of Hailey Piper’s own humane monstrosities. There’s a lot of heart below this scaly skin, and it pulses with a fresh empathy that really gets under your gills.”
Releasing from Tor Nightfire 11 August 2026, A Plagued Sea by Kim Bo-Young (translated by Sophie Bowman) is available for pre-order now.
BOB PASTORELLA
