A Plagued Sea by Kim Bo-young

[ekzepp@lemmy.world]

Kim Bo-young relocates The Shadow Over Innsmouth to a quarantined Korean fishing village, and Sophie Bowman’s translation makes the dread rise like a tide.

Review - A Plagued Sea by Kim Bo-young: The Korean Lovecraft Retelling That Grieves

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/240019934-a-plagued-sea

Kim Bo-young is one of Korea’s most important speculative writers, and A Plagued Sea is her first horror novella in English, translated by Sophie Bowman and published by Tor Nightfire on 11 August 2026. It reworks Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth, moving the story to Haewon, a Korean fishing village sealed off three years into a plague quarantine. Part cosmic horror, part pandemic elegy, it follows a grieving security officer enforcing an isolation she cannot escape as the villagers begin to change. This A Plagued Sea review looks at why a hundred-page Korean Lovecraft retelling hits harder than novels five times its length.