Reviews

It apparently falls to me to review this fairly old and very by-the-numbers slasher horror from Korea, of which I've only come across the first and third volume of three. The plot is a decently executed but entirely unoriginal I-know-what-you-did-last-summer affair, bombarding the reader's sympathies with as ghastly a sequences of torments as the author can imagine, including a very nasty thread of victim blaming.

The characters are a mob of pleasingly illustrated but distinctly superficial and unlikable rich kids, with typical emo, ice queen, nice guy, bad boy and tragic beauty stereotypes. Attempt to build sympathy for some murder victims fall flat; I predict that the typical reader will be glad to see most of them go, and feel sympathy for exactly the same characters at the beginning as they do after the dist has settled from the fairly predictable twist.

Yet I still remember this story a decade later. I suppose from the guilty pleasure of familiar and exploitative emotional notes played straight and played hard.