Synopsis
Ji-won’s life tumbles into disarray in the wake of her appa’s extramarital affair and subsequent departure. Her mother, distraught. Her younger sister, hurt and confused. Her college freshman grades, failing. Her dreams, horrifying… yet enticing.
In them, Ji-won walks through bloody rooms full of eyes. Succulent blue eyes. Salivatingly blue eyes. Eyes the same shape and shade as George’s, who is Umma’s obnoxious new boyfriend. George has already overstayed his welcome in her family’s claustrophobic apartment. He brags about his puffed-up consulting job, ogles Asian waitresses while dining out, and acts condescending toward Ji-won and her sister as if he deserves all of Umma’s fawning adoration. No, George doesn’t deserve anything from her family. Ji-won will make sure of that.
For no matter how many victims accumulate around her campus or how many people she must deceive and manipulate, Ji-won’s hunger and her rage deserve to be sated.
Review
Ji-Won, the protagonist of Monika Kim’s upcoming The Eyes are the Best Part, joins a slew of recent horror protagonists who push the boundaries of the “good for her” trope and rely more on just the absolute unhinged spectacle of a woman come undone, slipping into madness and violence (I’m looking at you, Maeve Fly). And, honestly, I’m here for it.
Ji-Won is a freshman college student living with her mother and her younger sister, just after their father’s sudden abandonment. He has, of course, met another woman, and the family his instantly forgotten.
This inciting event starts Ji-Won’s descent into a murderous rampage that looks less like rage than a terrifying compulsion. She kills a homeless man and, yes, eats his eyeballs. These descriptions are rendered in ways that are simultaneously grotesque and semi-erotic, and maybe it’s that feeling, or maybe it’s Ji-Won’s barely repressed romantic feelings for her female classmate, or maybe it’s George, her mother’s new boyfriend, or maybe it’s the blinding headaches, but now Ji-Won is driven by a near addictive need for eyes.
Almost without noticing, Ji-Won has become L.A.’s latest serial killer, but it’s a testament to the power of the novel’s first person POV that as readers we’re less concerned with Ji-Won’s mounting body count than we are with what’s going on with George. The new man in the family is a ridiculous caricature of the Ugly American with an Asian fetish and a self-professed knowledge of Asian food culture. George is so cartoonishly lecherous and awful, that we’re more than ready for Ji-Won to give him what he deserves, a payoff the book withholds masterfully.
The other key male character, is similarly ludicrous: a loose satire of the proverbial “nice guy,” who proclaims not only his niceness but his feminist bonafides every chance he gets, all the while refusing to take the hint from Ji-Won that she’s just not into him.
What works in The Eyes are the Best Part has everything to do with Ji-Won’s unique perspective, and the scenes with her mother and sister are fun, sad, and harrowing by turn. There’s also a brief fake out near the end that lands remarkably well.
There is a slight confusion of tone here, always edging toward satire, but not quite crossing over, so we’re still left to view the events through something like a realistic lens, and I’d almost prefer to see the book break free of that constraint.
In the end, the plot kind of gets away from itself, with a few too many holes to ignore, but we’re not here for plot. We’re here for a portrait of an unhinged woman who just might get revenge, get the girl, and get away with it all.
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