Thought Train to Pusan

This is probably a story that most people are familiar with from some adaptation or another, but upon seeing the old copy of this book on my friend’s shelf recently, I realized that I have neither seen nor read a single one? Which on the one hand makes sense because I don’t ever really read horror, but at the same time my friend has gotten me into watching horror movies within the last few years so this almost seems like a bit of an oversight! No time like the present, though! And I know that while this is said to be a true story, there are some questions as to the validity of it: was it all a scam? Is the tale an exaggerated account of the real paranormal (or parapsychological) events that happened in the house? Why would a family just up and leave to pitch a tale that could possibly make them money but possibly not, in particular after spending so much money on the place to begin with? I don’t know, but the idea of this being a true experience for this family real

Hmmm. I think I ruined my own experience of this one through my own past knowledge of it: I’m pretty sure I haven’t read it in the past, and yet, I was already aware of all the plot points once it started rolling. Beyond that, I suppose, there are the characters, but even they were totally disaffecting to me. There is a finely-crafted and unsettling mood around everything which works incredibly well in this story and it’s unfolding, but I felt like I knew exactly where it was coming from and the characters themselves were pretty predictable in my eyes. This is all to say, going into this story not knowing is the best way to do it, otherwise you may be asking yourself, “is that it?” because the short notes of it are really the whole thing in the end: it’s a novel without any extra unnecessary fat to trim, so therefore any knowledge beforehand leaves little to be discovered beyond the mood of the whole thing. It’s kind of like how I felt about the movie The Beguil

I can’t remember where I heard about this book or why I jotted it down on the ever-expanding list of books to read that is constantly being updated in my phone. But then I happened upon it at the library while looking for something else and said, well there had to have been a reason I wanted to remember it for later, right? Turns out my intuition was wrong this time, as this was not an enjoyable one in my opinion. It’s funny, I actually started this novel immediately after finishing the graphic novel, Skim, and found a few coincidental similarities in the plot points: lonely girl in a small town, girl trying out new identities, friends that may actually be more toxic than good for you, small town rattled by a teen boy’s suicide, girlfriend of the deceased is queen bee of the school but may in fact be more than she appears to be, etc. But let me be frank when I say that beyond these surface similarities, they were very different books with drastically different tones. Girl