- This bestselling cult novel from Korea is about vampires and how challenging they find humans. I found it exquisitely boring.
- Nevertheless I continued reading it, not just because I'd bought it, but to see if some underlying theme would emerge that would give it some deeper meaning. It did, sort of. Loneliness is central. Vampires exploit loneliness. Children for example kill Santa when they're young, which is why every child gets lonelier and lonelier as they grow up.
- There are two central characters, Suyeon, a female detective, and Violette, a vampire hunter. Six suicides, or so it seems, have occurred at a Rehabilitation Hospital. The old women, who suffered from dementia or depression, had jumped from the sixth floor over a period of weeks. Surprisingly, there was hardly any blood. Violette concludes that a vampire did it. There were two holes above the left clavicle on each victim. Vampires suck so much blood that if humans fall from a height immediately afterwards, a minimal amount of blood leaves the body.
- Or is there a human serial killer involved? Nanju, a nurse at the hospital, is a suspect, because she cared for all the victims, and was recently identified as a drug dealer. She owed money to criminals and was desperate. Nanju would have picked the victims, who were ‘tired of living'.
- Violette is an expert on vampires and knows some intimately. Lily is one. Lily discloses that vampires are two hundred years older than most humans. Violette also knows another vampire, Greta, who tells her about the old Agreement between humans and vampires: vampires would not kill humans by drawing human blood. They would only weaken them, and the victims would fully recover after a few weeks.
- The novel doesn't end satisfactorily at all. The police don't believe in vampires, and mistrust Detective Suyeon and vampire hunter Violette. So that's it.
No comments:
Post a Comment