Chapters Unbound: Episode 17
There’s discomfort, and then there’s this.
Monika Kim doesn’t creep up on you, she opens the door, nods politely, and lets the rot in.
In The Eyes Are the Best Part, we follow Ji-won, a Korean-American student unraveling slowly but surely. Her father’s gone. Her mother’s replaced him with something worse. And Ji-won herself? She’s caught in a spiral of hunger, disgust, and twisted longing that makes you want to close the book and keep reading at the same time.
What starts as discontent grows into something far more visceral. Not through gore, but through something stickier: shame, desire, and decay wrapped in silence.
Capturing the Moment
For this Chapters Unbound, I focused on one scene, or more precisely, one gesture. A wooden figure sits still, a fish on its legs. Between two chopsticks: a silver eye, held up, as if ready to be eaten.
And that’s the word… consumed.
By family. By expectations. By appetite.
It’s all there, in one image. Nothing dramatic. Just quiet horror, waiting for your attention.
A Descent Without Drama
What makes this story so unnerving is how calm it all feels. No screaming. No monsters. Just soft collapses behind closed doors.
Kim doesn’t force you to feel anything. That’s your job. And that’s the horror. It builds in the space between sentences. In the things Ji-won doesn’t say.
The grotesque isn’t loud here. It’s deliberate. And somehow, weirdly beautiful.
Final Thoughts
I thought this book was absolutely gruesome, and I mean that in the best way.
It disturbed me in all the right places. It’s sharp, controlled, and beautifully weird. The kind of story that claws at your brain hours after you’ve finished.
Monika Kim doesn’t just write horror. She writes human rot with elegance. And I hope she never stops.
This edition came in the Evernight box from Illumicrate, and I couldn’t be more pleased, and mildly disturbed, to have received it.
If You Like These, You’ll Want This
If the twisted minds of Clive Barker, Margaret Atwood, or Gavin Gardiner speak to you, this one won’t leave you untouched.