COME DOWN TO A LOWER PLACE
by Yi Seoyoung
translated by Janet Hong.
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Publisher: Honford Star
Published: October 17, 2025
How had no one told me this was what this book was about?
There’s a smell coming from beneath a department store in Seoul that no one can get rid of.
Seul is brought in to figure out why. She’s warned there’s a curse beneath the building. Don’t dig. Just cover it with another layer, the way they did before.
She digs.
What comes up is tied to the women who worked there during the Japanese occupation of Korea. Women whose labor was exploited and whose bodies were treated as an inconvenience. They couldn’t step away. They couldn’t take care of themselves when they menstruated. They bled through their clothes and kept working.
And all of that suffering, humiliation and rage has been sitting beneath the floor.
This is where I absolutely loved what Yi Seoyoung was doing.
Because the horror here is shame.
Seul has chronic yeast infections. There’s odor. There’s discharge. There’s blood. There are men who have made her feel disgusting because of things her body does that she cannot control.
And Yi Seoyoung does not politely look away from any of it.
She puts it right there on the page.
I actually cackled thinking about how uncomfortable this book has to make some men because there is absolutely nowhere to hide. All of those things women have been taught to whisper about, disguise, clean up and be embarrassed by?
Here they are.
And now they have tendrils.
There’s something almost gleeful about how shameless this book is about the female body, especially when shame itself is part of the horror. I adored that.
And that history underneath it isn’t invented. Mitsukoshi was a real department store in colonial Seoul. The women’s bodies and labor may become horror here, but the system Yi Seoyoung is writing from was very real.
I also have to mention Janet Hong’s translation here. So much of this book depends on language that could very easily be softened, made coy, or pushed just far enough away to make the reader more comfortable. It isn’t. The English feels direct and matter-of-fact even when what’s on the page is deeply uncomfortable, which makes Yi Seoyoung’s refusal to be embarrassed by any of it hit even harder.
If you remember A Plagued Sea, this is another book from Honford Star’s Lovecraft Reanimated project, where Korean speculative fiction writers take Lovecraftian horror and make it very much their own.
This one is feminist and grotesque and angry and completely shameless.
And it just makes me happy.
Just read it.
Where to Read It
Honford Star |. Amazon.
