Review | Murder and dark side of human psyche explored in intense blood-soaked thriller by bestselling Korean author

The Good Son
by You-jeong Jeong
Little, Brown

“The smell of blood woke me,” says Yu-jin, the 25-year-old narrator of The Good Son. As he lies in his bloodied bed, raking over aspects of his life, including his childhood prowess as a competitive swimmer and his incomplete memories of the night before, he believes he is experiencing hallucinations as a result of not taking his medication.

He is jolted fully awake at 5.30am by his adopted brother, Hai-jin, phoning to ask why their mother rang him in the middle of the night and why she’s not answering her mobile now. Yu-jin gets out of bed and follows bloody footprints down the hallway to the bottom of the stairs, where he finds his mother’s body. Her throat has been slit. “I couldn’t breathe,” he recounts, even as he spies his own bloodied reflection in the window glass. “Everything in my mind was crashing down; everything swam before my eyes.”

Who wouldn’t want to know what happens next in this unusual – and unusually gruesome – did-he-do-it psycho­logical thriller by South Korean novelist You-jeong Jeong? Now widely regarded as her country’s leading writer of psychological crime and thriller fiction, Jeong trained and worked as a nurse before turning to fiction and has penned four bestselling novels, including Seven Years of Darkness – which sold half a million copies in South Korea and was named one of the top 10 crime novels of 2015 by German newspaper Die Zeit – and 28 (2013), also a No 1 bestseller in South Korea.

All her novels so far have been translated, but The Good Son is the first to be translated into English. It has sold more than 600,000 copies in her home­land, where it was published as Origin of the Species and cemented her reputation for writing extraordinarily intense narratives distinguished by complex characters, intricate plotting and elegant sentences.