A young woman signs her soul away to a mysterious company in Park’s horrific fantasy novel.

Josie Morris’ life is falling apart. Her uncle just had a heart attack, the lease on the apartment she shares with her girlfriend is about to run out, and she can’t find a job; it won’t be long before her checking account is empty. Driven by these stressors, she accepts a position at a megacorporation called Eburos despite a disastrous interview involving a chalk drawing that somehow disappears and a woman with a shadow that moves before she does. Josie writes off the strangeness—she figures she’s had holes in her memory since her dad died, and that these are probably just stress-born illusions. The signing over of her soul during orientation? She must have imagined that, too. But now she’s being led to a building under a cemetery, there’s a magical flute made of bones, and everyone is calling her Grace. The further she gets into her new role, the more she learns the eerie truth about what Eburos is really up to. The novel’s plot can’t be explained in too much detail without spoiling things—the fun comes from trying to figure out what’s happening. Park masterfully plays with the story’s tension by weaving in different media throughout: There are posters in the common kitchen area reminding people to remove any “disciplinary residual limbs” from the fridge; a snapshot from an interview with an employee who is glad to “participate in true disruptive immolation”; and pages from the company handbook explaining that the terms “slave” and “thrall” are prohibited. Josie is a likable main character; the reasoning behind her motives can sometimes be iffy, but this rarely detracts from the overall reading experience.

A fast-paced and fun read that will keep readers wondering what will happen next.

An ancient debt haunts a family in Park’s horror novel.

It’s 1998, and 11-year-old Mark Morris has just moved from Schaumburg, Illinois, to Louisville, Kentucky, with his parents and older brother, Don. A thin, creepy man—who has an unknown, menacing history with the boys’ father—arrives at their door; instead of giving them a typical name, he tells Don and Mark to call him “the chicken man.” He knows all about their family, including their older sister, who mysteriously died when Mark was 4. As they try to figure out more about the chicken man, they meet a nun at the neighboring rest home who turns out to be their great-aunt; she horrifyingly tells them that their deceased grandfather was a Nazi, that a family heirloom lamp is made of human skin, and that there’s an outstanding debt related to something agreed to long ago in Dudweiler, Germany. A series of supernatural experiences culminate in a grisly night during which someone is killed, another is horribly maimed, and yet another is stabbed. Eighteen years later, Mark is living in Brooklyn, New York, working as an electrician, when his girlfriend Caitlyn tells him she got a strange call from someone in Germany, claiming to be his sister: “She said some kind of bird man was keeping tabs on you.” The chicken man is back, wreaking havoc on the lives that Mark and his family members have carefully rebuilt. Over the course of this novel, Park ably uses religious symbolism, as well as mythical motifs of ancient Germanic people, demons, and even a dragon, in a story that is certainly not for the faint of heart. It’s a graphically violent tale, featuring such horrors as crucifixion murders, lobotomies performed with icepicks, and body parts torn out—and they’re all described in frightful detail. Themes of trauma and guilt, persisting across generations, effectively underlie the action, and the conclusion hints at a sequel.

A twisty, violent tale of a brutal legacy.

A recent high school graduate attempts to save her mother and the world in Park’s YA horror novel.

Josie Morris isn’t happy to see the ghost of her dead father at her high school graduation ceremony. She doesn’t believe the ghost is real, of course, but the last time she saw him, her mother forced her to take antidepressants. Even so, the ghost offers her a cryptic warning from across the crowd: “Ten days.” He tells her a story about a Kentucky dragon, an extinction event, and a swarm of creatures called blacklegs located deep in the ground that are about to surface like cicadas. Josie has an even more disturbing vision that night at the Brooklyn apartment she shares with her mother: a winged figure with hooves and a glass mask dragging a chained woman down the hallway. When Josie escapes her hallucination, her girlfriend Clara is there to comfort her, but they soon discover Josie’s mother has gone missing. Desperate to find her mother, Josie follows a trail of clues left by her father before his suicide—including a confusing notebook and a long-lost cellphone—to her father’s hometown in Kentucky, where her Uncle Don may hold the key to these strange happenings. Whether the coming apocalypse is real or merely a madness specific to her family, Josie knows she has to solve the mystery if she doesn’t want to suffer the fate predicted in the one word the glass-face man spoke to her: burn. Park succeeds in creating a feeling of disquiet that pervades every sentence, as here when the girls land in Kentucky: “The air here was heavier than in New York, strong with pollen, like a close-up inhale of dandelion weeds. Past the lot, a tangle of concrete highways cut them off from chain hotels and a distant amusement park. But that tense pull wasn’t going away. Something knew they were here.” Unfortunately, disquiet is pretty much all there is; no recognizable world or relatable characters are established to anchor the reader, and the plot unfurls by means of a dream logic that, while creepy, never makes much sense.

An unsettling but shapeless suspense novel.