Cho Yeeun’s The New Seoul Park Jelly Massacre, translated from Korean by Yewon Jung, begins with the story of two lost children, Yuji and Jua. They meet at the Lost Children Center at New Seoul Park, an amusement park outside Seoul, after each has been separated from her parents. Yuji comforts Jua, who cries uncontrollably, and persuades her to leave the center so they can look for their parents themselves. After Jua and her mother are reunited, Yuji’s sorrowful jealousy of their intimacy surfaces; whereas her parents don’t seem to want even to hold her hands while walking around the park, Jua’s mother caresses and repeatedly hugs her daughter. Full of feelings she can neither name nor control, Yuji impulsively drops a jelly candy into the smoothie that Jua and her mother share.

The candy is a gift from a mysterious vendor who promises that anyone who eats the candy will “never split up” with the people they want to be with: “You’ll be inseparable for the rest of your life.” The true meaning of the vendor’s promise is revealed that evening, when everyone who has eaten the jelly melts away, merging into a grotesque, sweet and sticky mass.

Over the course of the novel, nine stories tell about this horrifying day from the perspectives of several linked characters. Two stories feature Sajun, a worker who wears the costume of Dream Teddy, the park mascot. Sajun is constantly murmuring calculations, figuring out how to make it through each month on his meager earnings while putting aside savings in the hopes of one day being able to afford his own home in Seoul, far from the dormitory room he shares with Yeongdu, a reclusive young man about whom ominous rumors circulate. Another story features Da-ae, who accompanies her philandering boyfriend to the park where she hopes to fix their shaky relationship. Yu Hyeongyeong, CEO of a cleaning company, and Jua’s mother are both on their own after unhappy marriages—one ended when her husband died in a car accident, and the other when her husband, a failed academic, became a shut-in, cooped up in a room with no company but ants, packages of jelly, and a bad odor. And there is Dream Kitty, the tuxedo cat that once lived in a red brick house with Jua’s long-gone grandmother, whose house has been demolished to make way for the theme park.

Cho’s isolated characters are filled with sadness, longing, and rage. Their horror stories are complemented by the horror of the jelly, which is truly disgusting—a “sticky, pink hell” that overtakes the visitors to the New Seoul Park and into which Yuji watches Jua and her mother dissolve over several dramatic, ghastly pages. But the overall mood of the stories is more sorrowful than horrifying, capturing the sorrow of characters who don’t know how to connect, who are lost in fantasies or cut off from others because of poverty. Some fantasies in which these characters indulge are banal, such as the those offered by the amusement park. Da-ae, for example, imagines “there would be nothing but fun and pleasure there, that the place was like an igloo made of sugar, which no misfortune in the world could infiltrate.” Other fantasies are more threatening. Yeongdu and Hyeongyeong are obsessed with the contents of an ancient, demonic book and the ominous promise of a coming “day of the banquet,” which they discuss pseudonymously on an online message board.

Who is the vendor handing out deadly candy in New Seoul Park on an extremely hot summer day? Is he in fact the devil who, Hyeongyeong asserts, does indeed exist, and “soothes our hearts” and “hands us sweet, sweet jelly in the moment of our greatest need”? His identity seems less important than the fact that people do indeed turn to him for solace. Whether the vendor’s promise of inseparability is even true is belied by one story featuring a sentient mass of jelly that lives a kind of half-life, still seeking the person they had seemed to merge with. The tuxedo cat, meanwhile, watches everything with the detached wisdom of a creature that has lived a long time. Humans, she observes, “always came and left so easily. All she could do was accept things as they were.”

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Cho Yeeun was born in 1993 and won the Excellence Prize at the 2nd Goldenbough Time Leap Fiction Contest and the Grand Prize at the 4th Kyobo Story Contest. She is also the author of Shift; Cocktails, Love and Zombies; and Snowball Drive.

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Yewon Jung is a reader first and translator second. Her translations include The Specters of Algeria by Hwang Yeo Jung. She lives on a small island in Korea with her husband and enjoys taking long walks along the beach.

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Rachael Nevins is a writer, editor, and librarian whose poetry and essays have appeared in Brooklyn Poets Anthology, Hazlitt, the Ploughshares blog, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Only Provisional was published in spring 2023 by Ethel, and she writes semi-weekly essays on imagination, art, literature, and the restless search for the good life for her Substack newsletter, The Variegated Life.