Holy Boy

About

Four women — wildly different in age, background, and motivation — share one obsession: Yosep, a dreamy twenty-one-year-old K-pop idol known as "the boy." When their fixation escalates from devotion to abduction, the consequences are devastating and irreversible. What begins as dark comedy about fan culture turns, with sickening precision, into a psychological thriller about desire, control, and the violence that hides inside worship. Lee Heejoo constructs each woman's perspective with unsettling empathy, making their logic feel almost reasonable — which is exactly what makes the novel so disturbing. The K-pop industry, with its manufactured innocence and parasocial intimacy, provides the perfect architecture for a story about love that devours its object. A novel that takes the darkest impulses of fan culture to their logical conclusion — and doesn't look away from what it finds.