Diary of a Murderer
— Worth the detour
About
It's been twenty-five years since Kim Byeongsu last murdered someone — or was it twenty-six? Now elderly and battling dementia, the retired serial killer has settled into quiet domesticity. Then his daughter brings home a new boyfriend, and Byeongsu recognizes something in the young man's eyes: the unmistakable calm of a fellow predator. He decides to come out of retirement for one final kill. Kim Young-ha's title story anchors a collection that lives on the razor's edge between dark comedy and genuine menace. Each story explores characters at the boundary of extremes — between life and death, sanity and madness, morality and its absence — with prose that is precise, unsettling, and unexpectedly funny. Stories that prove the most frightening thing about monsters isn't their cruelty — it's how reasonable they sound when they explain themselves.
