“There are some people you just can’t love. Even when they smile, they make you want to pull on either side of that smile and rip their mouth off.”
Twenty-five-year old Yu-jin wakes up with ‘the smell of
blood’. He soon finds that he is covered in blood (whose?), and there are bloody footprints all over his
room. Yu-jin is epileptic and has taken meds from his childhood. But when he
voluntarily skips the meds, to fend off numbness (drugs’ side-effects), he
suffers from seizure and memory loss. He remembers sneaking from his room after
11 pm to go for a run. Everything else is a blank. Yu-jin slowly staggers
downstairs only to discover his mother’s body, throat slashed from one end to
the other. He delves into his muddled thoughts to figure out what had really happened,
since all signs suggest that he is his mother’s killer. The question ‘why’
hangs in the air, alongside the smell of blood as Yu-jin begins the quest to
find out the murderer. And what he finds pushes him further to sift through his
mother’s secrets and uncover the true nature of his identity.
Korean novelist Jeong You-jeong’s, The Good Son (originally
published in 2016, translated to English by Kim Chi-young in 2018) opens with
such an interesting premise. It’s a very cleverly constructed thriller that
unfolds within small space (a triplex apartment) and a handful of characters. The
author also brilliantly uses the time-worn technique of unreliable narrator.
Here the narrator (Yu-jin) has the most unreliable memory and the past he
pieces through his mother’s journals is also fragmented and doesn’t clearly
assess the truth in a situation. You-jeong’s story demands little suspension of
disbelief, and in turn she steadily guides us deeper into Yu-jin darker psyche.
Frequent readers of crime thrillers can easily predict the
twists, but the narrative structure also doubles up as a character study. Yu-jin’s
relentless inquiry of his self makes the book truly unputdownable. The novel puts
us in a preoccupied position that you just want to keep turning the next page and take one step closer to the answers. In stories featuring psychopath, you’d always witness
some people acting like fools to give the anti-hero a chance to evade their
grim fate. As The Good Son moves toward the ending, we get a bit annoyed by the
utter foolishness of a certain character, which culminates into a predictably
dark resolution. Otherwise, The Good Son is a devastating read, a gripping
psychological thriller exploring the darkest recesses of a disturbed
individual.
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