Books › Diary of a Murderer
Diary of a Murderer
208 pages
An electric, boundary-pushing collection that balances on the razor's edge between good and evil, truth and fractured memory.
What it feels like
Reading this collection feels like walking a tightrope over a psychological abyss. It is an electric, provocative experience that constantly shifts the ground beneath your feet, asking you to question who can be trusted when memory itself begins to fracture. The pace is brisk and captivating, pulling you through tense explorations of serial murder, family disintegration, and obsessive creativity. The mood is edgy and uncertain, laced with moments of dark comedy and profound questions about the limits of loyalty and love. Translated with a sharp literary sensibility, the prose keeps you off-balance yet entirely engrossed. It is a perfect match for readers who crave dark, worldly fiction that explores the murky boundaries between life, death, and morality.
- Mood
- tense
- psychologically fraught
- edgy
- uncertain
- Tone
- provocative
- darkly comic
- questioning
- unreliable
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- unreliable memory · family disintegration · limits of loyalty and love · the edge between good and evil · creative obsession
- The writing
- Electric and provocative, translated into English with a sharp, captivating edge that keeps the reader off-balance.
- The arc
- Moves from disorienting suspense and fractured trust into provocative explorations of human frailty and obsession.
- Who it's for
- Readers who love literary short stories that blend psychological suspense with dark, philosophical questions about morality and memory.
Content notes
- serial murder
- memory loss
- kidnapping
- infidelity
About the book
"In the titular novella, a former serial killer suffering from memory loss sets his sights on a new, and final, target: a killer targeting young women, his daughter included. Complicating matters is an old detective seeking to close the cold cases from the now-retired murderer. But whom, if anyone, are we to trust? In the following three stories we witness a family's disintegration after a baby son is kidnapped and recovered years later; a comic, erotic ride about pursuing creativity at all costs; and an affair between two childhood friends that questions the limits of loyalty and love"--
"From "one of South Korea's best and most worldly writers" (NPR): An electric collection that captivates and provokes in equal measure, exploring what it means to be on the edge--between life and death, good and evil"--
Description from Open Library.
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