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Alien Gods
Book talk with "Lovecraft Reanimated" authors and translator: Dec 13, 2025 -- UPDATED with event report!
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POST-EVENT REACTION
The event was a big success!
We had about 12 people associated with the Korean Literature Club at the "Lovecraft Reanimated" book-talk.
Some among our people posted summary-comments and pictures to our KakaoTalk group. (The Kakaotalk group now stands at 82 members; and some regular, in-person attendees and other associated persons are not in it.) I can repost some of that here, onto the more-open Internet. My own summary-effort depended heavily on photographs. GR being an all-text medium, the impact would be lessened (but that's okay).
I was furiously taking notes during the main portions of the event, with an eye to maybe writing an event-report as I did with the May 2025 event. I haven't had time yet to go through them or synthesize them into any possibly-useful form.
Check this space later...
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---> PDF VERSION: TinyURL.com/mu5cphjr
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EVENT REPORT for the "LOVECRAFT REANIMATED" EVENT
(Saturday, December 13, 2025)
Host:
Taylor Bradley of Honford Star (publisher)
[Panel 1]
- Su-hyeon Lee, writer
- Anton Hur, translator
Discussing the origins and development of the Lovecraft Reanimated project; the trajectory of Korean SF and Fantasy genres, both in Korean-original and in translation, especially since the late 2010s; and Su-hyeon Lee (author of Alien Gods)'s SF/Fantasy writing influences.
[Panel 2]
- Bo-young Kim, writer
- Seo-young Yi, writer
- Jaehoon Choi, illustrator, graphic-novelist
- Hannah, live interpreter.
Discussing their motivations, how they see the Lovecraft genre, how they personalized the genre and/or adapted it to Korea(n). Discussing their fears and their approaches to writing fantasy-horror as such.
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INTRO
Here we are, in the interests of literature, roaming around within this odd-shaped, classily-decorated, overly-mirrored space. (It's normally used, we're told, for Tango dance classes.) Good feeling permeates the air in here. The kind of feeling that has strangers feeling themselves old friends. At least for a short time.
Now the clock has struck 2:45pm, starting-time. People begin to settle into seats. One among our number, having jumped to the first row, waves some of us over.
A Korean woman materializes before us, at the front-center of the room. Who is she? I've never seen her before.
Someone I do recognize is Anton Hur. He's looking in less than tip-top shape this day. I'd been pointing him out to other people from our group immediately upon spotting him. He'd come in, without fanfare, and zeroed in on acquaintances to talk with. "That's him. Yeah, the one in yellow with the scarf."
Anton Hur now proceeds to the front, plops down on a couch, and sinks briefly into it. He closes his eyes, as if savoring moments of comfort on a weary body. (What has he been up to?)
SU-HYEON LEE is the woman at the fore and her nervous excitement is noticeable. The quiet persona she presents belies her status as an important figure, even pioneer, of the science-fiction (SF) genre in Korean fiction in its current state. She is the organizer of the entire Korean Lovecraft project! (I only figure out how important she is, something like halfway through into Panel 1.)
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(What follows here is my synthesized re-running of the whole event. It's based mainly on the notes I took at the event, integrating some other info available and some of my own interpretations. An event summary? But it's no "summary" in the sense of shortness. I hope it's useful to you out there. Don't give up. Onward....)
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PANEL ONE: SU-HYEON LEE & ANTON HUR
SU-HYEON LEE AS KOREAN S.F./FANTASY-FICTION PIONEER
Born ca.1977, Su-hyeon Lee (이수현) graduated from Seoul National University (SNU) with an MA in Anthropology around the early 2000s. She credits anthropology training or exposure with influencing her literary interests and writing. This includes the premise and plot for Alien Gods" (2020), the story she wrote for this Lovecraftian series.
Su-hyeon Lee and Bo-young Kim are near-contemporaries. (Bo-young Kim was on the second panel, being author of one of the other stories in the Lovecraft Reanimated series.) I have a feeling Su-hyeon Lee and Bo-young Kim have known each other since the mid-2000s at least.)
I assume that Su-hyeon Lee got interested in Western "S.F.," Fantasy, and related genres in the 1990s, maybe even before she entered SNU. But very surely her presence at (a place like) SNU, with its vast library, resources, and networks of talented people, allowed an early interest to become cemented and flourish.
She found success as a writer first in 2003, when she won a writing contest in the fantasy genre ("북하우스가 주관하는 제4회 한국판타지 문학상"). She has mainly worked as a translator in the years since. She has some major translations in this and related genres to her name, including the Game of Thrones novels.
Su-hyeon Lee toiled in semi-obscurity, throughout the 2000s and into the 2010s, as a translator, writer, and promoter of SF/Fantasy in fiction. The SF/fantasy genre(s) remained long without respect in Korea, and without much of any serious ecosystem. The 2000s-era webzines were about the limit. And without "real" (adult, paying) audiences. Before the 2020s, SF/Fantasy was understood to be a foreign genre. But there were a committed few who carried it forward. It seems this woman, Su-hyeon Lee, was one of these.
THE ORIGIN OF THE "LOVECRAFT REANIMATED" PROJECT
By the end of the 2010s, a rise in SF/fantasy popularity in Korea was finally underway, after decades of failure-to-launch conditions. Su-hyeon Lee had been, I assume, hoping for such a development for twenty years. From what I could gather, it was she herself who took the lead in organizing a Koreanized Lovecraft project, pushing the idea by around late 2019. This book-series is the result.
The collected works of Lovecraft had only been published in Korean in 2009, she says. (I find a seven-volume, small-print set of Lovecraft in Korean, amounting to thousands of pages, credited to translators 정진영 and 류지선, published in 2009.)
Su-hyeon Lee says she had been aware of some Korean fantasy-fiction works "influenced" by Lovecraft, the Lovecraftian style, even before the 2009 collected-works set. But, of course, for Koreans ("Korean-Koreans," not those with formative experiences in the US/etc.), engaging with material in their own language, the 2009 collected-works set is a landmark moment to the rise of awareness of Lovecraft and the "Lovecraftian" genre. Jump ahead about a decade and the "Lovecraft Recreate Project" (as they called the original Korean stories), manifested.
"Lovecraft's world fascinated me," Su-hyeon Lee tells us, "but I became more critical of him over time. His weaknesses were clear: Racism, sexism. But then 'literary cancel culture' came." She reports that in the exuberance of the political mood of the late 2010s, she started seeing activists in the US/West begin to push to eliminate Lovecraft from the public literary sphere. Su-hyeon Lee seems genuinely annoyed at this, even years later. The whole thing was "an insult to our intelligence." We are adults! (Well, we do try be.)
Lovecraft was under serious pressure throughout the mid-late 2010s and early 2020s. Sometime in the late 2010s, during the Cancellation wave against Lovecraft (and many similar moves of the time), Su-hyeon Lee came across a short novel titled "The Ballad of Black Tom" by Victor LaValle (2016). Victor LaValle is Black. His 2016 story "revisited" a Lovecraft story from 1925, "The Horror at Red Hook" and inserted a Black character at the center.
Lovecraft's original 1925 story had distinctly White-racialist themes, reflecting the cultural-political mood of the early-20th-century United States. The 2016 retelling of the story is from the perspective of a Black-male character (like the author himself). Su-hyeon Lee says it was from this premise that she'd gotten the idea: might some Korean authors "do the same for Korea"? From that idea eventually came this Lovecraft Reanimated collection.
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ANTON HUR, having up to now enjoyed sitting on the plush couch at the front-center of the room as dozens looked on, now gears up to speak. He is not as energetic this day as he often is, but maybe he's just "warming up."
He'd shown up in a bright-yellow, sports-like jersey with the word SWEDEN on it. It's a soccer national-team jersey. Above it he has on a pro-Palestine scarf. Maybe some other symbolic items I've missed are in there somewhere.
These kinds of accoutrements are useful to him as conversation-pieces and political-signals. "It's because he was born in Sweden," I'd explained the shirt before the event to another person who came with the Korean Literature Club. He seems to have no connection to the country other than that, but it's an interesting conversation-piece. Anton Hur stresses his Korean-ness to Koreans and his international-ness to the rest of us.
As for the Palestine scarf, he wants to signal he supports the dispossessed Palestinians and other such causes as that (although less-so than the longtime, 'hardcore' activist Bora Chung, whom he has translated several times and with whom he has a teasing, brother/sister-like relationship).
My notes for Anton Hur are substantial but less coherent. He speaks quickly and fluidly. He can dart around rapidly, as he entertains one and all (including himself). Unless I learn shorthand, I can't make notes in the style I like to from his discoursing. I mean not as satisfactorily as I'd like.
(It's true that I could make sound-recording to consult later, but that's a practice I've always disliked and avoided when possible. There is value in notes as living documents; what my attention-focused energies ended up putting to paper from the whole spectacle before us here. Notes ought not be thought of as imperfect imitations of some perfect source-text, but an act of co-creation!)
Anton Hur gets going.
TRENDS IN KOREAN S.F. AS VIEWED BY ANTON HUR
The host says that Anton Hur has been at the forefront of the rise of Korean science-fiction (SF) literature in English translation, a trend highly visible now in the mid-2020s. Anton Hur looks self-satisfied at this. His face shows his agreement.
(The whole Korean SF trend remains, I think, a surprise for all involved. One senses the still-lingering excitement of newness. Anyone who remembers the 2010s will remember Korean-SF at near the "zero" mark.)
How does he see the trend going forward? Anton Hur answers by tracing back to the first upward leap in the thing. He says he's part of an exclusive Korean-to-English translating community. They call themselves the "Smoking Tigers." They trade around ideas, pick up on things. There's a collective-intelligence thing going on. One of the "Tigers" is Sophie Bowman. In 2020, she was at work on the first-ever Korean SF novel in English translation: I'm Waiting for You , by Bo-young Kim. This book was released in April 2021 and, he says, starts the trend.
(The author, Bo-young Kim, is in this very room, in the back somewhere. Did she hear her book named?)
Early reactions to the I'm Waiting for You book had shown considerable interest and potential for this long-neglected genre. The novel found a surprise audience. By now, it has 2,221 ratings on GoodReads, suggesting hundreds of thousands of readers. The trend was underway, therefore, by 2020 when that first SF novel was in the pipeline.
Anton Hur stresses that there had never before been a book of Korean SF translated into English before Sophie Bowman's translation of Bo-young Kim's I'm Waiting for You (2021). (There had, however, been a few one-off story translations here and there in the 2010s, and then, in 2019, an academic-press volume of Korean SF, which could be called first. See: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... ).
Soon after people picked up on the success, or potential, of I'm Waiting For You, the translator known as Soje began work on the SF novel To the Warm Horizon (Honford Star, May 2021, put out on an expedited basis). Not long after that, Anton Hur was at work on the fantasy novel Cursed Bunny, his own breakout success (Honford Star, July 2021).
These trends were not the decision of any one individual, Anton Hur goes on to say. They were a collective decision based on perceived market-moves; on the SF/fantasy trend in Korean literature, and on ongoing changes in the Western-reader translated-fiction market. (Honford Star bet big, and quickly, in 2020-21 on such works. The bet paid off and Honford Star grew considerably.)
(CONTINUED. . .)
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Anton Hur now brings up the tv-series "Squid Game." People have said it was that show that inspired Korean-fiction-in-translation to move towards SF/Fantasy. He has some words for those people:
"No! Everything was already in place when 'Squid Game' came out." The writers/translators/publishers were first. They were the trailblazers. If anything, the book-people influenced the tv-people and not the other way around.
("Squid Game" was released in September 2021; produced between mid-2020 and mid-2021. Whether the timing exactly supports Anton Hur's version of this history is up for debate. It's probably better to say both the text-trend and the screen-trend drew in parallel from a third force. A trend is bigger, wider, than any single manifestation of that trend.)
ANTON HUR TAKES PARTIAL CREDIT FOR KOREAN SF/FANTASY TREND
Anton Hur claims that from 2020 to 2022, a group including himself consciously sought to change the face of Korean fiction-in-translation. He says he perceived, back in the 2010s, that people out there, non-Koreans, wanted Korean SF/Fantasy. This was fulfilled totally in the early 2020s, Anton says, and quite as he'd envisioned it, and thanks in no small part to himself. "We managed to create a movement!" (A characteristic declaration from the never-shy Anton Hur.)
He concedes that the world before 2020 did exist. Among the influences on Korean SF/Fantasy genre in its current shape a standout case is the 2013 movie Snowpiercer. (There was another movie or tv-series title he mentioned, which I heard as "8-24." I don't know what it refers to.)
Anton Hur has negative words for the other big 2020s trend in Korean fiction-in-translation: Healing Fiction. "I can't do Healing Fiction," he frankly says. He also spoke negatively about the translating of classics from decades past. "Do we really need another novel by Yi Mun-yol in English? No, we don't. Okay, maybe we do, but..." Anton uses mannerisms and an irony-infused tone of voice which are conveyed through text only imperfectly.
Anton Hur adds a coda on what he's just said by talking about how literary trends happen at all. Can he, or others in positions of influence, "lead" readers in new directions? The answer, he says, is Yes. Can authors "lead" readerships? He says: Yes. "Readers want to discover something." It's a wrong idea, he says, that successful authors are just people waiting around for trends onto which they can jump and coast along on.
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KOREAN SHAMANISM AND FANTASY-FICTION
The host asks Su-hyeon Lee about the shamanism theme in her Lovecraftian story, "Alien Gods." What's the Korean-shamanism connection about?
Su-hyeon Lee says her short novel Alien Gods is a kind of Koreanized re-telling, of the Lovecraft story "The Rats in the Walls" (1923). (All the original Lovecraft stories, long out of copyright now, are available in HTML at HPLovecraft.com.)
One of her friends had had a terrible experience with rats in an apartment in Seoul. "I used her (real-life) story with permission."
Su-hyeon Lee reflects that in Lovecraft's stories "the horror comes from the outside. [Lovecraft] feared the unknown, the alien, people he was not familiar with. It's similar to how hatred works in general." She says that while Alien Gods could be seen as a re-telling or adaptation of Lovecraft's "Rats in the Walls," in the case of her story the horror comes not from the outside but from the inside, from inside the house and mind.
Her story's connection with Shamanism, or "Mudang-ism" (the Korean shaman is called a Mudang), traces to her Anthropology background. She said she did her MA thesis on the Korean-shamanic goot (굿) rituals.
Su-hyeon Lee says she has no religion and softly disavows personal belief in shamanic channeling of the spirit-world (many Koreans do believe in it). For her, Korean shamanism is fascinating, intriguing—sociologically—in part because it's female-oriented. (Korean fiction writers being highly interested in shamanism is a pattern I've noticed.)
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ANTON HUR's TRANSLATION PHILOSOPHY
The host now asks Anton Hur: Speaking of Shamanism, why did you decline to translate the word Mudang"? What's behind that choice to leave it as "Mudang" in the English text?
Anton Hur begins to recall how, in his first book, The Court Dancer (published August 2018), he italicized Korean words. He continued that traditional practice -- italicizing non-recognizable, non-English words -- for another book or two, he says, but then stopped. He says he doesn't want to italicize anymore.
There is an ideological angle here. Italicizing supposedly "others" the source-text, language, culture. (The traditional practice does have many good uses, but Anton Hur and the other de-italicizers think, or want to say, that it was a purely arbitrary invention explicitly intended to demean other languages and nothing else.) The whole thing is quite in line with Hur's conspicuous avoidance of pronouns, and the sometimes-confusing overuse of the word "They." This came up repeatedly ahead of, and during, our Club's recent December 2025 session discussing the Tteokbokki book.
One solution to the problem of unrecognized foreign words is something Anton Hur calls "self-glossing." Lots of readers won't know what "Mudang" refers to, that's true. To "self-gloss" in the text could mean, for example, to lead with the term "Mudang-shamanism," and then thereafter go with (only) "Mudangism."
Anton Hur says there's been a strong idea influencing publishing to the effect that English-language, Western readers will never pick up a book by any Nonwhite author. He jokes that he broke through because people assumed he was Swedish, based on his name (Anton).
Anton Hur now drops into another tone, as if lowering his voice and crouching in to tell a secret. He asks, as rhetorical question: Was there race bias on the International Booker Prize 2025 judging panel? He drops in a pause, less through silence than a subtle shift in intonation. What is he hinting at?
Anton Hur assumes the audience knows he was an International Booker Prize 2025 judge. He says a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) he had to sign forbids him from commenting on anything related to the Booker process until 2045. He slyly invites people to inquire again when the NDA expires.
(Based on a look at the shortlist vs. longlist, and knowing something of Anton Hur's temperament and politics, I think I can guess what he was hinting at or would say if that "NDA" were not in place. The Int'l Booker Prize 2025 judges were: (1.) Chair, novelist Max Porter, white; (2.) poet Caleb Femi, black Nigerian origin; (3.) critic Sana Goyal, Hindu-Indian origin; (4.) translator Anton Hur, Korean; and (5.) singer-songwriter Beth Orton, white. I can imagine easily Anton Hur and Caleb Femi, of Nigeria by way of the UK, imagining themselves outvoted, 3:2, by the two whites and the woman of Indian origin. The six-nominee shortlist had: 4 White authors, 1 Indian [the winner], and 1 Japanese. The thirteen-nominee longlist had 6 Whites, 2 Blacks, 2 Japanese, 1 Indian [the winner], 1 Mexican, and 1 Palestinian. Those cut from the longlist, who didn't make the shortlist, were therefore: 2 Blacks, 2 Whites, 1 Japanese, 1 Mexican, and the 1 Palestinian. The pool of nominees went from 6/13 White (46%), to 4/6 White (67%).)
These days, Anton Hur goes on, marketing people say: Listen, translators and everybody else, Don't pay attention to those who only feel comfortable with Western authors and contents. It's a new day.
The rise in literature-in-translation in English remains a new phenomenon and people are still feeling their way through things. But the old (supposed) taboo against it, if it still exists, is much diminished.
Anton Hur says: "We don't translate for readers who are against foreign words. 'Oh, I'm going to stop reading this because I see the word 'Doenjang'. No! Most readers of translated literature love to see that, to see new words."
Beyond the questions of approaches to translation, he says, many people are interested in shamanism, and Korean shamanism in particular now more than ever. Korean shamanism had a highly niche audience among Westerners even in contact with Korea, largely limited to academics and persons of like temperaments. (To be fair, if "fair" is the word I want, Koreans themselves were embarrassed by their shamanism tradition, and generally sought to push it under the rug, until very recently.)
These kinds of choices, such as keeping the word "Mudang" in, are in the interests of this type of reader. So says Anton Hur; so translates Anton Hur in the 2020s. (I'm not sure I agree with this, in principle. Every story is different. Sometimes what he says can work. As a universal principle, it may not serve us well. Absolute principles of translation may tend to hurt more than they help.)
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WHAT IS "LOVECRAFTIAN"?
The host now turns to Su-hyeon Lee: What, in your view, makes something "Lovecraftian"?
She answers: It's really the horror of the unknown. This kind of thing is popular these days because we know that we don't know everything in the universe. And we can enjoy the unknown! We can embrace the unknown.
At this point, Anton Hur chimes in, the smart-alec student in the back of the room despite being front-center on this comfortable couch. He dives into an empty space of silence: "And also tentacles!"
The "tentacles" line gets the kind of laugh he draws such positive energy from. Panel 1's time is almost up, but he's just gotten warmed up. I think Anton Hur is the kind of guy who may need a "warm-up act" before he comes on stage. The man is definitely entertaining as a public persona. This seems like it'd be unusual for someone who works in translation. But here we are.
The host asks Anton Hur a final question: "What is your interest in Lovecraft?" He says, "If you're writing speculative fiction in the 21st century, you're going to owe something to Lovecraft." I'm almost certain he said the word "writing" (not translating). Anton Hur has seen himself as a successful translator for years, but, since the summer of 2024, he's also seen himself as a novelist owing to his sci-fi novel Toward Eternity.
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WHAT OF THE ORIGINAL LOVECRAFT-REANIMATED COLLECTION (2020) in KOREAN?
Sitting in the front row, next to several other Korean Literature Club people, I ask an audience question: Tell us more about the original Korean series from 2020. How was it received? Was it a success?
If it were me answering such a question, I'd have gone with a "Yes, it was a success," and framed it that way.
Su-hyeon Lee, however, doesn't do this. She says something like: It wasn't a great success. I say: Who's to say what success means?
The host has a similar idea, and points to the way success can be judged in the new publishing environment: the strength of Crowdfunding. In early 2020 they raised $25,000+ in a short period. This crowdfunding success attracted the attention of Korean publisher Alma Books (알마), who bought it. (Honford Star later bought the translation rights, I suppose, from Alma.)
I'd say the series came through at all counts as a success. It wouldn't have been possible in 2000 or 2010. But in 2020, it came through. The 1920s is said to be the decade Lovecraft really came into his own. Jumping ahead one century to the 2020s, he pops up in such way as this, far away.
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Panel 1's time is up. Anton Hur has refrained from criticizing Lovecraft for racism, sexism, or any other handy "ism." Su-hyeon Lee had brought it up only to push back vigorously and defend Lovecraft.
This is interesting for those who attribute to the mid-2020s a different mood than the long late-2010s/early-2020s moment.
(End of Panel 1.)
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(CONTINUED below with PANEL 2. . .)
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"LOVECRAFT REANIMATED" EVENT
December 13, 2025, in SEOUL
[Panel 2]
(1.) Bo-young Kim (writer);
(2.) Seoyoung Yi (writer);
(3.) Jaehoon Choi (illustrator, graphic-novelist); and
(4.) Hannah ____ (live interpreter).
__________
A brief intermission between Panel 1 and Panel 2. Stragglers among our group are in the rear, backs against the wall, the universal pose of "I came in late and don't want to cause any disruption." I beckon them to come up. We have some saved seats.
Anton Hur disappears, now, into the back of the room. Back into the arms of his many literary-scene orbiters, we can presume.
But, what's this? Within a few moments I spot a female member of our group maneuver to zero in on Anton Hur. He is led to sit down next to her for a time. The next thing we, sitting near the front, see? A three-person "selfie" with the hotshot translator. (For some reason, this person declines to share that shot with the rest of us.)
Stepping forward, now, are three Koreans: Bo-young Kim (author of On the Origin of Species and Other Stories, and a long veteran of Korean-SF's long wilderness period) and two others. Of the others, one is a happy-looking woman with bright-shiny skin who is bubbling with energy; the other, a taciturn-looking man who, I'd guess, has no interest at all in bright-shiny skin.
Who exactly are they? We wait to hear from them.
Also stepping forward, now, is a sleekly-attired Korean young woman who I soon figure out is the live-interpreter. She takes up her position at a table placed to the left of the panel. She opens a laptop. It is emblazoned with stickers bearing political slogans and the like. Probably an interesting person to talk to. It seems she is herself within the Korean literature-in-translation scene, but has obviously also had live-interpretation training and seems to write notes to herself in some variety of shorthand.
The two new occupants of the plush couch, the one Anton Hur had enjoyed so much, sit erect and silent. They await the host's action. And here it is. The intermission is over. My own mind appreciated the brief break (for the note-taking upon which this account is based is a taxing thing).
It begins:
BO-YOUNG KIM'S APPROACH TO LOVECRAFT in 2020 AND HER STORY'S "PLAGUE" PLOT
BO-YOUNG KIM's part in this series is her story A Plagued Sea. She is such a relatively big name, now, after the success of On the Origin of Species (published in English in May 2021), that a major U.S. publisher, Tor, negotiated for rights to her novel in the Lovecraft series. Tor for some reason demanded an August 2026 release-date for A Plagued Sea, and got it.
Bo-young Kim says she based her Lovecraft Reanimated story on Lovecraft's "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (1931). (As I said earlier in this account, all the original Lovecraft stories, being out of copyright, are available in HTML at HPLovecraft.com).
"Covid influenced the plot" of her choices for this project; her story includes a plague plot. This is one of those interesting little details that come out at events like this, interesting because it ties the writing quite definitely to a narrow window of time: after late-January 2020 (when China "locked down" a province), and probably even to after to mid-February 2020 (when, in Korea, fears of "pandemic" started to influence attitudes, behaviors, and policies and started bringing out Korea's various latent authoritarian, low-social-trust, and xenophobic tendencies). The stories were all published together in mid-May 2020.
The date-range for the time of writing -- some time probably ca. mid-February to ca. April 2020 -- is interesting (to me for this reason: The entire global reaction to the word of a "novel virus" in early 2020 was, to me at the time, something lifted from many disaster- or horror- texts (or movie scripts) that people had seen. When the panic crossed a certain threshold, people simply inserted those texts into their ordinary realities, which, I thought at the time, explained the major successes of the Lockdown ideology despite it being unprecedented and against the Western tradition. So here you have a skilled writer in the same genres that people were borrowing from to reframe their own realities in 2020, writing a fiction work based on the same ideas. Fiction influencing reality, and reality influencing fiction back in turn!)
Bo-young Kim adds that she gave Cthulhu a physical form. In one of the Lovecraft original stories, characters aboard a steamship manage to defeat the monster. This, she says, proves that Cthulhu had a physical form. (Some people have argued it was a kind of spiritual or metaphysical creature.)
THE DELIGHTFUL SEOYOUNG
To Bo-young Kim's left (the audience's right), on the couch, is SEOYOUNG YI (이서영), another writer. Her personality: I, we (I feel confident in saying "we"), find it delightful. At the least it's a delightful stage persona this Seoyoung has got.
I am hearing of Seoyoung for the first time. To me she is a complete blank-slate. She is well within the realm of "first impressions," and it is a good one. (I feel I've been encountering Anton Hur again and again but this event is only, I believe, the second time in person.)
Seoyoung is far-less prominent than Bo-young Kim, but she makes up for obscurity with a very interesting, sincere, and attractive performance at this event.
Let me put my I'm-sure-vague-sounding praise into a form more concrete: Everything about what I see and hear from Seoyoung indicates she is happy to be here. That is not necessarily clear of some of the other panelists. (Sure, they are probably shy to be in front of all these foreigners.)
In my brief KakaoTalk report on the "Lovecraft Reanimated" event, sent out about 24 hours afterwards, I praised Seoyoung as a surprise star of the show. These kinds of events are always interesting because you really never know what you're going to get. Others at the event (I later am to learn) have a reaction to Seoyoung similar to mine.
Seoyoung is achieving this good impression despite speaking only in Korean. Most attendees, non-Koreans, can either outright not understand Korean or only imperfectly understand it. Her words are interpreted into English by the fast-talking interpreter, Hannah.
Some panelists (one in particular) have been putting intense pressure on the abilities of Hannah (who is a human-being after all) by speaking in long, several-minute blocks without giving the interpreter a chance to get anything out. But Seoyoung is speaking in short blocks. Every so often she looks over at the interpreter, lightly grinning, conveying a "Go on, give 'em what you've got; I'm on your side here!" This is a great asset in any public setting. Koreans call it "Sense" (센스). Another way she does it is to speak in simpler Korean, which I interpret is to bring in a greater part of the mixed-language-ability audience than if she's ripped through trying to sound as smart as possible.
Seoyoung is speaking about her writing and her interests. She says her interest in Lovecraft was the tentacled monster he is most famous for. She felt "sucked in" by that thing. It feels like she wants to say more but holds back.
Things move onto the fifth guest of the day, the taciturn man on the far end.
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LOVECRAFTIAN ILLUSTRATIONS
JAE-HOON CHOI. The only male writer of the four present today. He is an illustrator. His work adorns the covers of all eight books in the series (the illustrations are also used for the four English translations). For this series he also drew/wrote graphic-novel set in Korea based on the Lovecraft style.
The series project-manager, Su-hyeon Lee, mentioned in passing, that as originally conceived (around 2019), Lovecraft Reanimated was to be all female authors. That all-female goal was soon abandoned as unnecessarily constricting.
Jae-hoon Choi says that with his Lovecraft illustrations, he was trying to combine various images of Lovecraft that he liked and synthesize them.
Drawing up these images back then, and creating his own graphic novel as one of the entries in the series in early 2020 was indeed during the "Corona" period, referring back to what Bo-young Kim said. Was this influence there on his work? Yes, he supposes so. But there were plenty of other things. Conflict between generations; gender politics; other types of politics. He says he was interested in how we can have social dialogue in a healthy way.
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SQUID AND COSMIC HORROR
The host turns again to Bo-young Kim. Is it right that you were not so familiar with Lovecraft before becoming part of the project, and that you undertook some research on Lovecraft in the run-up to writing your story? Yes, that's true, she nods in response. And what was it like researching Lovecraft?
Bo-young Kim says she connected with Lovecraft's famous Cthulhu monster because of her familiarity with eating squid (a miniature sea-monster of its own). So, her first connection-point was "squid."
More literarily, she became interested in the concept, or genre, of Cosmic Horror. Why am I here? What am I doing? This is a form of horror. Why do people get scared in front of giant open spaces? Or at the concept of the vastness of "outer space"? It's because we are nothing compared to vast emptinesses, she says, and tried to incorporate this kind of feeling into her writing.
Bo-young Kim had ended up discussing the ideas of cosmic horror with a man she knew at the time. Their discussions on cosmic horror were so interesting that the two never got around to stopping talking. The man is now her romantic partner. (He's here at the event; he'd later sit next to her at the signing. I didn't get his name. Lovecraft might be proud to know he has this power to bring people together, evidently including romantically, a century on.)
A CUTE, LOVABLE CTHULHU
The charming Seoyoung comes back into the spotlight now. Face beaming and seeming to want to jump out of her seat. Referring back to Bo-young Kim's mention of eating squid as a connection with the Cthulhu monster, Seoyoung says: You know, there's a joke in Korea about Lovecraft's monster. "The monster's not so scary. Just dip it in sauce. Then eat it. That's all there is to it."
Seoyoung says, in seriousness, she actually did think of the tentacled creatures less as exotically terrifying and more as lovable and alluring. Seoyoung grew up in Korea (she is b.1987, according to the Internet). Not only will she have seen live (small) squid or octopuses, and similar creatures, kept in tanks at seafood restaurants; she also almost-certainly will have eaten these sea-creatures, many times. She'll also, I think, many times have seen cartoon versions of cute seafood characters used as logos by seafood-restaurants.
While the physical tentacle-monster in Lovecraft is interesting, Seoyoung says, she cannot connect with the "horror" of it. Not in a way that could drive a speculative-fiction story.
What Seoyoung says she is interested in, is women's psychology, and women's social roles, and how those things can interact with horror.
BRINGING WOMEN AND KOREAN-SHAMANISM INTO LOVECRAFT'S WORLD
Seoyoung echoes the earlier comments of Su-hyeon Lee on women's role in Korean Shamanism. (Here again she shows situational awareness, paying attention to, and calling back to, others' comments.)
The female role in Korean shamanism is quite overwhelmingly dominant, she says, but such a dominance by women in shamanism is unusual in world cultures. Seoyoung feels it's fitting because women are somehow "closer to the unknown." In Lovecraft's stories, women are "the first to go mad." This is, she says, is a good insight into women's psychology.
Seoyoung says she wanted to bring in a lovable Cthulhu who interacts with "crazy women" characters. (It's a good thing she's a woman saying this.)
(CONTINUED. . .)
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Seoyoung says women are well aware that sometimes they can be "scary" to men. She wanted that in her story she wanted to bring this in. The story she ended up writing some might well read as horror while others might well read it as adventure, she says.
Seoyoung then says something I recorded in my notes but which I don't understand. I can give the line as I took it down, verbatim. Maybe you, reading this, can get something from it: "Ghost stories don't wrap up. I wanted to leave the same feeling." She's still smiling as she says this, still happy to be here, apparently.
THE SMALL-SCALE vs. THE LARGE-SCALE
Jaehoon Choi, the graphic-novelist, jumps in. He approached his story in a similar way to how Seoyoung approached hers.
He says with his project he focused less on vast, frightening things and more on everyday things. Going from a smaller conceptual space and towards something bigger. If you are killed by a family member, it's bad, of course, but the horror is all the deeper because these are the people closest to you.
Jaehoon Choi says we can be scared of the things closest to us, things we are accustomed to. It's a lot like a rain that slowly soaks you all through, without you realizing what's happening as it's going on. He says he was trying to capture the gap between small, detailed events and large-scale "issues."
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K-POP INFLUENCES?
The host now asks Jaehoon Choi about his Lovecraft Project graphic-novel's influences or inspirations. The story has to do with a K-Pop star ("idol") who commits suicide. Jaehoon Choi himself has worked in the K-Pop world, for example on a music video for the BTS member "RM." What's the connection here?
Jaehoon Choi says that twice in his life he had serious, life-threatening illnesses. He had a kidney missing at birth and he contracted tuberculosis once. He is healthy now. But, he says, anyone who seeks to tell stories has to ask himself this question: What stories can I tell? "The life-and-death motif is an important one for me," he says.
He says that the ideas he puts into physical form with his Lovecraftian graphic novel are not related to his K-Pop "work," per se. But, in this case, it is related to his "biases" related to K-Pop.
He adds a side-comment on what his experience working with K-Pop people has been. He says he has always generally approached K-Pop art projects with a cheerful air, trying to make things happy and positive. That would seem like what's intended with K-Pop. To his surprise, the clients tend to want to go in other directions. The cheerfulness usually has to change, on revisions!
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SEOYOUNG AS POLITICAL ORGANIZER; and THE QUESTION OF A FEMINIST LOVECRAFTIAN-ISM
Speaking of cheerfulness, the host turns back to Seoyoung, the middle panelist. The same question on the influences on the themes of her story.
"Your story deals with a tentacle monster. It also deals with capitalism and the Japanese occupation. Like Shinsegae Department Store in Myongdong, originally Mitsukoshi Department Store. How do these things relate to women's suffering?"
Seoyoung responds: "Oh, it's funny you ask. It so happens that I'm the general secretary of a trade-union organization in Korea of people who work in the duty-free areas of those department stores." She explains that the duty-free department-store workers are 98.6% women. Due to restrictions on them related to how often they can break away to use the toilet, they are 3.5x as likely as average South Korean women to get bladder infections. There are various other problems for women related to this and comparable work.
Seoyoung adds that she was "involved in anti-capitalism organizing" in younger years, back to her time in college. (This would've been in the late 2000s. She is absolutely too young to have been a core part of the hardcore-leftist political scene the b.1960s generation created in the 1980s. She could well be the daughter of such people!)
But make no mistake, Seoyoung goes on, while some political considerations inform something of the themes, her story ("Come Down to a Lower Place") is psychological horror and not some political tract.
Seoyoung says she has always been interested in cities and how they work. Lovecraft's original works often deal with cities and with the fear of the unknown in a vast, urban world.
Now, what of "horror"? In Korea, it seems to Seoyoung, horror is based more than anything on resentment (han).
Seoyoung remembers thinking to herself, back at the start of considering her story: Okay, you have a city; and you have resentment, maybe widespread among people, or some group(s) of people. What if the resentment(s) were physical manifested in the city? Where would these physically manifested resentment(s) "trickle down" to? Take those duty-free department-store workers, forbidden from using the toilet for long periods. Where would their resentments "pool up"?
Meanwhile, Seoyoung goes on, there's a certain sexually vulgar, insulting slang term in use today, an insult used by Korean men against women, which happens to overlap with the Lovecraftian tentacled-monster. This slang term (부징어) is a combination of a pre-exiting slang term for a woman's genitalia and a squid. It is a way to demean women by saying they smell like squid, she says; it is a term of hatred or abuse. She says she used this idea in the story. The story seeks to turn the tables on men who insult women using that term and in similar ways. "Here's that squid smell you're so terrified of!" (Laughter from audience.)
(Yes, all signs now point toward Seoyoung being more-or-less involved with feminist politics. This seems not at all unusual for the South Korean literary scene of our time.)
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THE CTHULHU VIDEO-GAME AND LOVECRAFTIAN MOVIES
A few more back-and-forths occur, as Panel 2 winds down, on inspiration and influences. Bo-young Kim says she took to playing a computer game based on the Lovecraft/Cthulhu universe. The game is one which, by design, no one can win. The game gives players the feeling of powerlessness, of inability to ever win.
Jaehoon Choi says he, too, played the Cthulhu game, but also watched some Lovecraftian films, including From Beyond (1986) and In the Mouth of Madness (1994).
Seoyoung didn't play the video game but engaged with other material. Early on, while thinking through what she could do, she read a certain webtoon(?) series based on Lovecraft called _________ (I didn't get the name). It made her think more deeply about urbanism in Lovecraft. And this connected, more or less, with the Korea she knows.
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EMBRACING vs. REJECTING FEAR. WHAT DO YOU FEAR?
Of Panel 2's audience questions, the best is from C., one of those who came with us (of the Korean Literature Club). C. is sitting a few seats from me, so I watched him closely as he asked the question and as the panelists asked for clarification.
The question: It seems like most of the stories in this series are about embracing fear or maybe re-appropriating it, let's say "flipping the fear," rather than actually living in fear of something. Making the fearful into the familiar. Do the authors think we should embrace fear? Is there anything we should be fearful of?
Jaehoon Choi agrees with the gist of the question. He says it's ironic how we, in modern society, seek to avoid that which gives fear, call it "horror" if you must, at all costs. He says it was common in the Middle Ages, and so on, for people to be killed, for primal fear to co-exist with normality. But this is not the case in modern society.
Jaehoon Choi says there are a few examples of primal fear remanifesting in everyday, modern society and these are interesting to think through. The example he gives: You're in a foreign country where you don't know language, people, anything, and it happens that you lose your way and get terribly lost (this seems to imply especially a pre-smartphone era or a situation in which you don't have connectivity). You're frightened. The feeling is natural. But today this kind of natural, invigorating fear is often absent. Death is a part of life, but we seek to avoid it. It's ironic.
When we do deal with death, we sequester it away. People generally no longer die at home. In normal circumstances today, people die at hospitals and are dealt with in funeral homes. He says he wants to look more directly at "darkness, fear, and death."
Seoyoung segues in here and says that misunderstandings, and things like deep guilt in interpersonal relations or situations, is what's most interesting to her. It's hard to really fear death much these days. "Our" horror (or the one she connects with) is about relationships between people (or failures of relationships), which can even lead people to kill themselves. This happens continuously around us.
Bo-young Kim says that what's really frightening for her is not the madness of a single individual (if and where madness it be), but the madness of an entire era. Say, political madnesses. (She then made certain political comments related to South Korean politics.) Waves of political madness can happen across time and in all societies. That, she says, is scary.
Bo-young Kim adds, as a final comment of Panel 2, that while this project was about "Re-imagining" Lovecraft, she thought of it from the start as being about being for people who love Lovecraft already. She calls back to Panel 1, when Su-hyeon Lee mentioned the various busybodies who sought to "cancel" Lovecraft not so long ago. It's wrong to criticize him as an individual, Bo-young Kim says. He experienced certain difficulties; he lived in an era one century removed from the present day. Take the good for what it is!
____________
With that, the discussion portion of this event wraps up. Things fade into the book-signing second half of the event.
Attendees mingle freely. Anton Hur, I notice, is writing all his dedications in cursive, which surprises me.
The charming and entertaining Seoyoung signs her name only with the Hangul for "Seoyoung" (i.e., "서영"), omitting her family-name just as I've generally omitted it in this account. When I come up and greet Seoyoung, with her unsigned book in hand, she writes a big "THANX" (with the 'x') to me.
We'll see if I/we like Seoyoung's story, Come Down to a Lower Place, as much as I've praised her for her positive contribution here at this book-event. (As I've already written, GR raters do have her book as the highest-rated so far of the Lovecraft Reanimated books.)
As the event-room began clearing out, those who remained of our Korean Literature Club group still around, with a few new friends, headed off towards directions unknown but ultimately to a cafe where we strongarmed our way into an excellent table and bantered on into the early evening.
We've reached the end of this event-report. I aimed to create a full "account" of the Lovecraft Reanimated event in Seoul, December 2025.
I'm sure I missed some things. But this was my best effort at creating a readable, synthesized, information-dense, narrative-like record of this two-hour event, which was my goal. At almost 8000 words, you should be able to consume it in, uhh, under 25 minutes! (I hope somebody out there finds it useful.)
Thanks to Honford Star (publisher); thanks to all the twelve or so Korean Literature Club people who turned out; thanks to the authors and translator. Until next time. . .
(END 4/4.)
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This was a good read. "I think I do understand ghost stories don't wrap it up. I wanted to leave the same feeling." I can't recall having ever read a ghost story, but I presume with the supernatural being front and center, that they never really explain how or why things happen in a perfectly rational sense and leave the reader with a sense of vague spookiness spookiness or a light blanket of uncertainty. It seems she also wanted to write a story that didn't remove all the mystery or explain everything. I say this not having read her work though.Although I was there, I was tired and distracted and hardly absorbed anything at all from the first session and only some from the second and I don't think I would have known how little I absorbed except as I read this I felt almost like a person who had not been there at all, except for some parts.
I'm honored to appear in your writing although I have one correction to make. I was sitting in my seat completely spaced out after the first session, and far from maneuvering to get Anton to sit next to me I was just zoning out when he popped up and asked if anyone were sitting in the chair. He sat next to me simply because there was an empty chair there, not because I'm maneuvered to get him there. The empty chair was there because before the talk began I had moved it there thinking my friend's friend would sit there, but he also brought his own chair. So there you have it! Fortune favored me with a brief moment next to the great Anton Hur, and despite having seen him on stage and then having had him sit next to me and now possessing a selfie with him, I did not notice he was wearing a sweatshirt that said Sweden nor did I notice the Palestinian scarf. Nor did I notice he looked tired. I noticed he had a face with eyes nose and mouth and that's about it. To answer the question of why I didn't share the selfie, well who wants a selfie of me and some guy? Especially one that turned out less than flatteringly.
Mod
Thanks.
(Yes, people: the person which my account refers to as having "maneuver[ed]" to engage with translator Anton Hur, and apparently got him into a seat in her vicinity, for a picture, was this very Hannah.
No, this is not the same Hannah as the live-interpreter, who by coincidence is also named Hannah.
The interpreter-Hannah was under great pressure during the event. That Hannah wouldn't have "maneuvered" away for such purposes during the brief intermission. She was heading to the front during the very same moments, ready for come-what-may.)
Mod
Reasons I was able to get so much information out of the event:
(1.) At the pre-event gathering at the Burger King, nearby, I made sure to get a coffee. The maximum effects of that coffee lasted me through the two-hour event, overcoming any default rainy-day lethargy.
(2.) Upon our initial group's fanfare-infused arrival in that basement-venue-of-mystery, we found a bunch of people wandering around semi-aimlessly. Our arrival was a slight bolt of energy, or seemed to be, and that good-felling carried through.
(3.) A minute or two after our initial group's arrival, after scoping out the length and breadth of the thing, one of the fast-thinking members of our group said this: "Hey, Peter, the seats at the front are open. Let's take them." I was all for it.
People who came with the Korean Literature Club ended up with about 7 seats at the front, with a scattering elsewhere.
Being that close to the speakers helped to connect. Let's say I "got" a lot more, throughout the event, than a hypothetical person identical to me in every way who saw the same exact same event but solely and entirely thru a medium like "Zoom," would have gotten.
(4.) The commitment to take notes very aggressively. I didn't plan ahead on that or think about it before I started doing it. It just seemed the right thing to do at the time.
At least one other among our group was taking notes, too, but we never compared what we had. (There's still time, if you're ever reading this. I think you know who you are.)
(5.) A lot of information never quite drags itself intact across various inter-cultural or inter-language barriers. Something about this little event struck me as one of those times, when a portal opens and such possibilities flow forth, if someone's willing to dive in. So I dove in. (It happens.)
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SIDE-NOTE: I got the sense that my note-taking was, at times, or maybe throughout, a little intimidating to some of the panelists, seeing me doing it as they were up there. I detected none of this, however, from Seoyoung, the one I was so very positive about for reasons I feel I mentioned repeatedly.
(Having now read Seoyoung's story, I'm glad I got my first impression of her during the event and decided I like her and am disinlined to change that. Because her story does not, I think, have people like me as the intended audience.
See: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... )!
The above is all good information to know! It's interesting you take so many notes and so intensively. I am not a note taker, though at times I've been mistaken for one. I do often have a notebook or journal where I write things down as I listen to or pretend to listen to people speak, but generally what I write down is fairly to totally unrelated to anything the speaker is saying. It's interesting you would find this event valuable enough to want to remember so many details. I tend to just experience things as they are in the moment and make no attempt to really remember anything. I think this particular event as it did not have microphones, I found the sound quality of many of the voices too quiet and I'm particularly bad at distinguishing voices from background noise, so my comprehension was very low.
Yes, apparently a person I saw the following Sunday read what you wrote and mistakenly believed that I had been the live translator and referenced it in an oblique way as if I would know of what they were speaking so that there was much confusion involved. I'm definitely not the Hannah who was the translator.
Mod
(I'm thinking even those with very-high English and very-high Korean won't be good live-interpreters by default. It's something beyond mere language skill.)
Another thing I remember, not in the main account, is how the live-interpreter Hannah never let on that she was under stress.
The only hint, I think, was her rapid rate of speech in English. Only when Seoyoung spoke -- in short bits, direct thoughts expressed compactly, and in unadorned style -- did Hannah have the slack to get in, and out, everything with calm mind. (Thanks, Seoyoung, wherever you are out there.)
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I made some slight changes to the "event report" and uploaded it as a PDF for easier sharing and consuming:
LINK:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iaRD...
- or -
Tinyurl DOT com SLASH mu5cphjr
TinyURL.com/mu5cphjr
Mod
I'll give this a 4 out 5 for a few reasons.
It presents an interesting topic that hasn't been explored enough. Mudangism in Korea.
The idea of Meaninglessness - of both ourselves and the universe. The fear of the unknown vs belief in something of an antidote to this great gulf of meaninglessness.
What could that antidote be? Is science and the pursuit of the analytical enough to quell those demons of madness, chaos, uncertainty unbounded?
What are those forces we can ally with which may give us a semblance of a chance for hope? A slight defence against the Existential Bottomless Pit of Despair?
Could it possibly be something, someone as simple and humble as a person, a woman, a victim who has herself stared into the Void and lived to see another day?
To whom do you look to find your antidote? The counterbalance to the Great Fear.
Mod
The RAS Korean Literature Club
Books mentioned in this topic
The Court Dancer (other topics)I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories (other topics)
To the Warm Horizon (other topics)
A Plagued Sea (other topics)
Alien Gods (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Yi Mun-Yol (other topics)Sophie Bowman (other topics)
Janet Hong (other topics)
Kim Bo-young (other topics)
Anton Hur (other topics)
Some members of this Club will be attending the following event this weekend:
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LOVECRAFT REANIMATED LAUNCH PARTY WITH THE AUTHORS AND TRANSLATOR
_____________
HOST
The publishing house Honford Star, which deals in Asian fiction in English translation.
-- Taylor Bradley is host and MC this event. He represents Honford Star within Korea.
__________
DAY & TIME
Saturday December 13th, 2025
2:45pm to 5:00pm
PLACE
"Tango Brujo" (탕고 브루호) (see below).
__________
EVENT
Book-launch / book talk / author talk for the "Lovecraft Reanimated" series, published by Honford Star in October 2025.
"Lovecraft Reanimated" is a collection of stories written by Korean authors in Korean, in the style of H.P. Lovecraft (originally in 2020), now translated into English.
The four stories published so far in the series:
- " Alien Gods ," by Su-hyeon Lee (tr. Anton Hur)
- " The Call of the Friend ," by Jaehoon Choi (tr. Janet Hong)
- " Come Down to a Lower Place ," by Seo-young Yi (tr. Janet Hong).
- " A Plagued Sea ," by Bo-young Kim (tr. Sophie Bowman). (The translator is, or has been, a friend of our Korean Literature Club and has translated Bo-young Kim in the past.) "Plagued Sea" is to be published in mid-2026.
Of the three published in 2025, "Come Down to a Lower Place" by Seo-young Yi has been reviewed most favorably so far.
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VENUE
-- Name of the venue in English (well, actually Spanish): TANGO BRUJO
-- Name in Hangul: 탕고 브루호
-- Address, Hangul: 마포구 잔다리로 68 지하1층
The venue, "Tango Brujo," is between Hongik University Station and Hapjeong Station, 175 meters due NW of the Burger King on the main East-West thoroughfare that passes through the "Hongdae" area. The building is named for something related to the YMCA (after its main occupant or owner). The building has a first-floor restaurant called "한소끔." The big Honford Star book event will be taking over the basement floor.
The previous Honford Star book-launch event in May 2025, which as many as 20 people associated with this Korean Literature Club attended, ran out of space. I wrote about it and posted it here at the time (see: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... ). The event was so popular that people were crammed, sardine-like, against the wall in the back (me included). It's too bad that the book being launched at the time, Red Sword, proved quite unpopular. But the event was a big success.
What will this one be like?
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SPEAKERS
-- Boyoung Kim (김보영): Author of the National Book Award nominated On the Origin of Species and three time winner of the Korean SF Novel Award, Boyoung Kim is the leading science fiction author working in Korea today. She contributed A Plagued Sea to the Lovecraft Reanimated Project.
-- Su-hyeon Lee (이수현): After debuting in 2002 with the Korean Fantasy Award, she has spent the next two decades introducing English-language SF and fantasy to Korean readers, playing a significant role in the genre’s growth in Korea. In this series, she is the author of Alien Gods.
-- Jaehoon Choi (최재훈) : Choi is a manhwa artist, animator, and illustrator. He was a conceptual artist for the 2024 movie EXHUMA, directed the music video for “Forever Rain” by BTS member RM, and contributed artwork for a global campaign by Mont Blanc held at NASA in the United States. He drew the cover art for the projects and contributed The Call of the Friend.
-- Seo-young Yi (이서영) : Yi is the award wining author of two short story collections, The Taste of Crocodile and Yumi's Lover, and received the Excellence Prize for Novella at the 2020 and 2022 Korean SF Awards. She wrote Come on Down to a Lower Place.
-- Anton Hur : Hur is one of the most important and prolific translators of Korean into English today. He translated Cursed Bunny, Your Utopia, and Red Sword by Bora Chung and is the author of Toward Eternity. He translated Alien Gods in the Lovecraft Reanimated series.
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