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[ENGLISH] Miracles Turn Costly in Shift scrap
by Leland Cheuk
June 9, 2026
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Shift
What if you had the power to “shift” one person’s disease into the body of someone else? What if you knew someone with that power who could help you heal a terminally ill loved one? Would you ask or influence that person to use that power even if it made someone else sick? Shift, award-winning science fiction and fantasy author Cho Yeeun’s 2017 supernatural mystery, newly available in English, poses these intriguing moral quandaries in a page-turner that moves like a Hollywood blockbuster with all its sinister villains and plot twists. However, readers seeking characters who rise beyond detective novel archetypes to seriously examine the larger philosophical questions the book poses will be left wanting.
Detective Yi Chang is introduced as a classic world-weary gumshoe. He’s “inordinately late for work” and looks “like a homeless man who’d been dragged there after a drunken tantrum.” Yi Chang has been assigned to investigate a corpse found on a beach, lying in a pool of blood. The dead man is the pastor of a religious cult named The Heavenly Revival Assembly. Twist number one: Ten years earlier, the cult miraculously healed Yi Chang’s terminally ill sister, who eventually died in a car accident. Yi Chang now raises his sister’s daughter, who has unfortunately inherited her mother’s terminal cancer.
Given the premise of the novel, there’s a lot left for the characters to unpack: the whimsical nature of life and death, our inability to control outcomes even when it’s tempting to believe we can, and fate versus free will. But the novel charges forward, as dictated by the requirements of the genre, without the characters reflecting much, if at all, about these strange turns in their lives. Yi Chang’s investigation leads him to a suspect named Lan. The detective believes Lan healed his sister, only to learn that it was Lan’s late brother Chan who cured her by shifting her illness to someone else.
The book then “shifts” from Yi Chang’s story to that of Lan and Chan. The author’s portrayal of tight sibling bonds forms the emotional backbone of the novel. Just as Yi Chang feels survivor guilt over his sister’s passing, Lan feels responsible for Chan’s violent death. We also learn that the dead pastor and his brother, the villainous Hans, have their own backstories.
Eventually, Yi Chang’s sense of duty to his niece leads him to ask Lan to shift her terminal cancer to his body. In this passage, he realizes that life offers no free lunches.
He’d searched so desperately for a straightforward miracle, but what he’d stumbled upon was a cold, bizarre truth: he had to stake his life for the cure. Miracles came at a price. What he felt now was a sense of emptiness, inertia, occasional anger, lethargy, and a faint hope sprouting from resignation. What a miracle required was simple: if you want something, you have to give something in return. It was an exchange, not a blessing.
What’s unclear is why Yi Chang realizes this many years after his sister received a miracle cure but died anyway, paying her own ultimate price for a miracle.
The book’s grisly climax happens by a dark, foreboding sea, where an evocation of baptism intends to resolve the novel’s many conflicts. Still, I couldn’t help wanting to know more about our gruff detective Yi Chang and his wants and needs as a person, a caretaker, and a surrogate parent. I wanted to know more about Lan as well, the young man burdened with unexplained powers and ineffable grief. The plot requires him to be consumed by a desire for revenge, but could he not do something else with his healing powers? Was Lan ever tempted to heal good strangers while punishing bad ones? Was he even conscious that he, as a former cult member, was also playing God?
Alas, these tougher questions are for a different, less cinematic book. For readers wanting an entertaining detective mystery with a fantastical twist, Shift will keep you shifting in your seats.
Writer 필자 소개
Leland Cheuk
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