This Korean Horror Novel Reinvents Vampires With a Brutal, Unforgettable Feminist Twist
Elizabeth is a Books & Television Writer for Collider. She received both her BA and MPhil in English Literature from the University of Cambridge, graduating with honors. While she was at Cambridge, she utilized her love for historical fiction by specializing in Victorian women’s writing.
Elizabeth enjoys reading both contemporary fiction and the classics. As a creative writer, she has been awarded The Anne Rivers Siddons Prize for Short Fiction and has been shortlisted for The Adroit Prize for Prose. If she is not reading or writing, you can find her swimming, antiquing, and bingeing on a cozy period drama like The Other Bennet Sister or Call the Midwife.
Halloween is just around the corner, and many readers may choose this time to revisit some spooky classics, including witchy books like Stephen King's Carrie or the Gothic stylings of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. However, this Halloween, you won’t find a more bone-chilling read than the newest title from award-winning Korean novelist Kim Bohyun. Combining vampire lore with the trappings of detective noir, Mothersucker puts a feminist spin on one of spooky season’s most iconic monsters.
Mothersucker is cut from the same cloth as Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, the 2021 novel that follows a new stay-at-home mom whose postpartum rage transforms her into a feral, dog-like creature. The new revenge thriller, which is out in the UK on October 22, 2026, touches on similar themes of female rage, motherhood, and supernatural transformation – except, this time, we have an enraged mother figure that is more Lestat de Lioncourt than Remus Lupin.
'Mothersucker' Has Two Complex Protagonists
Geum-hong, the 51-year-old vampire at the center of Mothersucker, begins the novel awakening on a mountaintop, buried under the soil. She rises to the surface and soon discovers that her senses have been amplified, she has superhuman strength, and there is an intense hunger clawing at her belly. With little memory of her past life, Geum-hong has no idea how long she had been baking under the earth, nor does she know that just moments before she lost consciousness, she had been spreading the ashes of her daughter, who was viciously murdered by an ex-boyfriend. Geum-hong may not have all the facts, but she knows one thing: She’s angry, and she wants revenge.
Not long after, Detective Jin-seon Noh finds herself investigating a string of male bodies, drained of blood, that keep cropping up across Korea. As she digs deeper into the stories of these victims, Jin-seon learns that all these men have one thing in common: They’re all guilty of vicious crimes against women. What follows is a cat-and-mouse game that asks readers to reconstruct their image of what a vampire is, while also questioning: What really makes someone a monster?
Horror Has Always Been Fascinated by Female Power
This feminist revenge thriller is the perfect read for the Halloween season because it plays with common horror tropes – the hungry vampire, the hard-boiled detective – while reimagining them through the female perspective. When was the last time you read about a vampire with pregnancy stretch marks, for example? To return to the two previous examples of spooky classics, Carrie and Frankenstein, it’s clear that themes around femininity and female power are important tenets of the horror genre as a whole; just look at Stephen King’s description of Carrie as “a frog among swans.” He describes his pathetic heroine as “a chunky girl with pimples on her neck and back and buttocks, her wet hair completely without color.” As we follow Carrie’s high school woes, her inability to conform to female beauty standards plays a massive role in her destructive decisions.
Alternatively, to take it all the way back to 1818, Mary Shelley initially decided to publish Frankenstein under the name “Anonymous,” fearing the backlash she would face for emblazoning her female name on the book’s cover. Confirming her fears, many early readers believed that the true author was Shelley’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. In this way, Mothersucker is just the latest installment in a long lineage of writers who use monster stories and horror tropes to investigate what it means to be a woman in the world.
Like Geum-hong rising from the dirt, Mothersucker brings horror’s feminist themes to the surface, while also injecting the tale with a sense of psychological tension that is also a hallmark of Korean horror. Although the book has been translated into English by Archana Madhavan, its original author, Kim Bohyun, is a master of her craft and is considered a literary superstar in Korea. She burst onto the scene in 2011 when she won the New Writers’ Award from the literary magazine Jaeum & Moeum, and she has twice won the Excellence Award at the Korea Story Contest. Mothersucker is Bohyun’s third novel.
Women's Stories Are Taking Center Stage in Contemporary Korean Literature
Picking up this fangy new book will give readers a top-tier introduction to Korean horror. Early examples of spooky Korean stories pull from folkloric tales that often feature figures like the wonhon, a vengeful female ghost. The wonhon could even be said to be a prototype for Mothersucker’s middle-aged mother vampire.
Themes of revenge and possession are also heavily prevalent in thrillers from the East Asian part of the world, as well as themes of intense social conflict. In 2017, Time Magazine published an article revealing that over half of South Korea’s reported homicide victims were women. Now that we are firmly in the age of AI, cyberstalking, and deepfakes, it’s safe to assume that the situation for women in Korea has only become more complex and dangerous since this report was published. To reflect this, female characters have recently taken on a starring role in contemporary Korean literature. Need convincing? Just pick up a few titles by Bohyun's contemporaries, like Lee Heejoo, author of the K-pop thriller Holy Boy, or Ji Young Kang, who writes about an average middle-aged woman who becomes a killer for hire in Mrs. Shim Is a Killer.
But whether you’re interested in exploring what womanhood looks like in a different part of the world, or just looking for a sharp, new thriller to add to your bookshelf this Halloween season, Mothersucker is sure to please (and creep out) more than one type of reader. While a date has not yet been announced for an American release, British readers can pre-order the book now from the Liverpool-based indie press, Dead Ink Books.
Likewise, Mothersucker has yet to be optioned for either a television or a film adaptation, but don’t write off the possibility of seeing its feral mother vampire and Sherlock-type female detective on screen just yet. Bohyun has experience working in film, having written the story for the 2022 Korean historical thriller flick The Night Owl. In fact, it was one of the top five highest-grossing movies in Korea that year, which bodes well for the possibility of a Mothersucker adaptation in the future. Who would you cast as Geum-hong and Detective Jin-seon Noh?
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