Cho Ye-eun is a writer expanding the boundaries of Korean genre fiction. Through works such as the short story collection "Cocktail, Love, Zombie" and the novel "The New Seoul Park Jelly Vendor Massacre," she has crossed between horror, thriller, occult and fantasy. Last year she topped Yes24's list of "young writers who will be the future of Korean literature."
Cho has now published "Believers of the Green Cliff," her first novel in three years. It follows a cult that believes aliens and UFOs will one day arrive and destroy the world. At a book talk held on the evening of Sept. 28 at Daesan Hall in the Kyobo Life Insurance Building in Seoul's Jongno District, Cho said she "used the cult only as the shell of the novel, that is, as its setting." She described it as "a story about belief, and a story about characters who stand on the line between the real and the unreal." The writer added that she "wanted to write about people who believe in something absurd." After settling on a cult as her subject matter, she said she "brought in aliens to make it look even more preposterous." She drew inspiration from a YouTube video claiming a UFO had appeared over an elementary school playground in Boryeong, South Chungcheong Province, in the 1960s and 1970s. "Back then, even if a UFO appeared in the sky, there was no photographic or phone evidence, so it could only be passed on by word of mouth," she said. "I thought it was the most fitting material for building a story in which you cannot tell what the truth is."
O-yeon and Je-eon, the novel's protagonists, embody belief from opposite directions. O-yeon, the adopted son of the cult's leader, grows increasingly doubtful of his faith, while Je-eon, who starts from disbelief, turns into a fanatic. The writer, who said she "designed the two characters like puzzle pieces," added: "They repeat the wrong choices, but I wanted to write a story in which, when you step back, those mistakes and errors and doubts come together to form one enormous whole." The meatballs that appear repeatedly in the novel carry the same intent. "Once you grind and mix all the ingredients into a meatball, it is hard to tell what went into it," she said. "I thought it was a fitting food for expressing a world built from things that cannot be believed."
On the theme of belief that runs through the book, she also shared an episode from this year's Chuseok holiday. Shrimp fritters are her favorite holiday dish, she said, and she had been saving the last one — only for her father to eat it and insist to the end that what he had eaten was a pollack fritter. "The truth I witnessed and what my father sensed were different," she said with a laugh. "It was like a message that compresses this novel."
