The Eyes Are the Best Part
Monika Kim
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781645661238
Erewhon Books, June 2024, 288 pgs
In Monika Kim’s debut horror novel, readers are served up body horror on broken plates and nestled within dreams. The Eyes Are the Best Part follows Ji-won after her Appa suddenly leaves her Umma, her, and her little sister to start a life with a new woman. In the wake of abandonment, Umma slips into depression and emotionally abusive, narcissistic behaviors, pushing Ji-won into the arms of the very white, very awful George.
Ji-won has taken on the responsibility of keeping her mother together while also trying to reassure her sister and stay off academic probation at school. When George arrives, Ji-won sees him as a blue-eyed demon. To everyone else, he’s a pervert, racist, and the worst. Under all the pressure of responsibility, Ji-won begins to obsess over George’s blue eyes, dreaming of de-eyeing and eating the gelatinous pearls on the living room couch.
The Eyes Are the Best Part is an unending ride of familial trauma and off-kilter realities that keep the reader at a state of constant what-the-hell-is-going-on. And that is not a bad thing. It adds to the atmosphere of the novel. It also makes it hard to fully find your footing in what is real and what is not real, causing the spiraling dark end of the novel to create a sense of vertigo with each life and eye Ji-won takes.
The theme and symbolism of eye consumption builds and layers itself so much that Ji-won’s yearning becomes uncomfortable at times. What is it she really wants out of George’s blue eyes? It’s more than cannibalism, more than destruction. Possibly a need for someone to see her and how bad things have gotten, someone to step in and be the parent that Ji-won and her sister, Ji-hyun, so desperately need? In the end, the yearning Ji-won displays is darker. It’s a need to let go of all sense of responsibility and politeness in a way that can’t and shouldn’t be fixed.
While the body horror and family trauma are strong in Kim’s debut, there is a bit of comfort that the author creates around the family meals shared between Ji-won and her family. They aren’t always pleasant, but they all capture the intimacy and turmoil of sitting down to eat as a tumultuous family. There’s also comfort in the small moments Ji-won finds in connecting with her sister and certain friends at school.
But The Eyes Are the Best Part isn’t a comfort read. It is unsettling, raw, and unapologetic. A sharp read for fans of dark tales about rough family dynamics and so much anger.
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