A Plagued Sea

About

While waiting for a train to the isolated seaside village of Haewon, bodyguard Mu-young gets a disaster alert: a massive earthquake has struck the eastern coast. She boards anyway — she'd rather face geological catastrophe than leave her niece in her mother's care. Three years later, Haewon is under lockdown. The earthquake unleashed an ancient plague that transforms its victims into fish-like creatures, and the government has sealed the village off. Mu-young's niece is dead. All she has left is hunting quarantine-breakers — and the question of whether survival is the same thing as deserving to live. Kim Bo-young writes speculative fiction that uses body horror to explore social horror — prejudice, abandonment, the way disasters reveal who a society is willing to sacrifice. A Plagued Sea is a novel about transformation in every sense: biological, moral, and the kind that happens when you realize the monster might be you.