Our Take

Monika Kim's debut announces a genuinely unsettling new voice in horror, one that uses body horror not for shock value but as a vehicle for exploring racial fetishization, generational trauma, and the particular rage of being an Asian American woman whose desirability is always someone else's fantasy. The novel sits comfortably alongside My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite in its blend of dark humor and creeping menace, and readers who loved the fractured psychological interiority of My Best Friend's Exorcism by Grady Hendrix will find a similar willingness to let a young woman's mind curdle in real time. Kim's prose is spare and controlled even as the content grows increasingly grotesque, which makes the horror land harder. This isn't a book that relies on jump scares or gore for its own sake; it's interested in the horror of being unseen, overlooked, and objectified, and how that neglect can metastasize into something monstrous. Fans of Bunny by Mona Awad will appreciate the campus setting and the way reality bends around Ji-won's deteriorating grip on herself. This is a book for readers who like their horror slow-building and thematically loaded, who don't mind ambiguity, and who want their scares to say something real about race, family, and desire along the way.