Satisfying. That’s the best way I can describe The Eyes Are the Best Part, a bizarrely lovely book about feminine rage and cannibalism. This debut horror novel from Monika Kim came out last summer and swept a whole bunch of awards and nominations, from the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel to being a Goodreads Choice Award nominee. It’s been on my TBR list for a while, and I finally got around to adding it to my plate. If you love stories about complicated and messy young women getting revenge, then The Eyes Are the Best Part is definitely worth savoring.
When Ji-won’s father abandons their family, her mother absolutely falls to pieces. Umma waits by the door for his return, cooks elaborate meals of traditional Korean foods, and eventually collapses into despair. Ji-won is just trying to get through her freshman year of college while staying strong for her mother and younger sister, Ji-hyun. Then things get even worse when her mother begins dating a white man named George. Umma is infatuated, but Ji-won can see that George is just a lazy freeloader with an Asian fetish. He ogles waitresses at Chinese restaurants, brags pompously about his travels, relishes in having Umma do all of his laundry and cooking, and won’t even learn to properly pronounce Ji-won’s and her sister’s names. Worst of all is how his eyes linger on the two teenage girls and the comments he makes when he thinks no one is listening. Ji-won has nightmares about those blue eyes—nightmares about plucking them out and popping them in her mouth like the savory fish eyes from her mother’s feasts. The worse George reveals himself to be, the more Ji-won’s hunger grows, until she begins to lose control of her thoughts and actions. As corpses with their eyes plucked out are discovered near her college campus, Ji-won must figure out how to get her revenge on George before she is completely consumed by her hunger.
There are two types of antagonists in The Eyes Are the Best Part: obvious bigots and the more insidious white knights. George is almost a caricature of a racist, misogynist creep. He uses and lies to women, leers at underage girls, and revels in racial stereotypes. His attitude is echoed by some of the boys on Ji-won’s college campus who brag about their sexual conquests and snicker about how submissive Asian girls are in bed. And yet possibly more disturbing is the behavior of Ji-won’s classmate Geoffery, who initially becomes her first friend at school but slowly reveals his true colors. Geoffery is the kind of “feminist” who has to announce it to every room he’s in, usually by wearing some politically themed t-shirt. Anytime Ji-won tries to talk about her experiences with George or creeps on campus, Geoffery goes into lecture mode, speechifying about the dangers of patriarchy and how he’s a good ally. But Geoffery doesn’t actually believe in the feminism he preaches—as shown by the way he continually crosses Ji-won’s boundaries, becoming more aggressive and controlling as she tries to pull away. George and Geoffery at first seem like opposite ends of a spectrum, but they are really two sides of the same coin; neither respect women as people with agency and autonomy and both have an over-inflated sense of their own value and importance. By the end of the novel, you’re rooting for both of them to get their eyeballs eaten…
This novel also takes an interesting approach to the idea of fate or destiny. Ji-won’s father believes strongly in traditional Korean astrology, which posits that the course of one’s life is determined by the configuration of the heavens at the time of one’s birth. Appa was born under a bad palja, or destiny, and this explains everything that has gone wrong in his life, from his inability to get a job in Korea to his business failures in America. Ji-won wrestles with this idea of palja. At times, she views her father’s bad fortune as a sort of family curse that hangs over their whole household and may have even been passed down to her. But Ji-won wants to believe that she can have control over her own destiny, so she makes a plan to take her family’s fortune into her own hands. Even her compulsion to eat human eyes is left somewhat ambiguous—is she being influenced by something outside of her control or is she making a deliberate choice? Sometimes you just have to try doing something in order to break a generational curse. (Although, for most of us , there are probably a few other things we can try before resorting to eating eyeballs…)
As long as you can stomach a bit of gore, you don’t want to miss The Eyes Are the Best Part! You can find it on shelves now at your favorite local retailer, or buy it online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. If you’ve already read it, let me know your thoughts in the comments!