LTI Korea 
DLKL 
SIWF 
[ENGLISH] Fans on the Run scrap
by Zach Savich
June 9, 2026
![[ENGLISH] Fans on the Run 이미지](/fileDownload.do;jsessionid=9C4CFBDE5A7C16C104ED5EBBA480352B?srvFile=20260609134204332203.webp&usrFile=25.webp&target=default&width=100&height=100&folder=reviews)
Holy Boy
Lee Heejoo’s first novel, Phantom Pain, explored K-pop fan culture and the lives of women in their twenties. Holy Boy, her first novel translated into English by Joheun Lee, is a darkly comic thriller that furthers her investigation of fandom and where it can lead.
“Some people fall in love with a figure in an old painting while strolling through an art gallery,” the narrator observes early in Holy Boy. “Compared to them, I would say I’m lucky.” The nature of that luck is complicated: four women kidnap Yosep, a pop idol, and hold him captive in a mansion full of taxidermy and secret rooms. They tell him he was in a car accident—that’s why his memory is missing—and needs to heal. The women worshipfully feed him soup, tend to his body, and keep him drugged. They cherish even his waste: “Don’t you think even Yosep’s excretions make him beautiful?” one says.
Despite that intimacy, Yosep remains an ideal with different meanings for each woman. Lee focuses on their competing fantasies and how far the women will go to maintain them. The ringleader, Ahnna, is a woman in her forties with a history of consorting with younger men. Mihee is a superfan who became homeless while following Yosep’s band. Nami is a spiritual seeker who, with mechanical precision, “creates her own prophecies and makes them come true.” And Heeae is Yosep’s birth mother—or so she believes. In Lee’s narration, Yosep is both central and secondary; he’s a screen for the women’s projections. This kind of fandom, the novel suggests, can’t withstand reality. “Don’t roses wither when plucked, and sparkling jewels turn to pebbles when held in the hand?” Mihee reflects.
Through madcap twists that continue to the final page, Lee also shows how pop music sheds light on society. The characters colorfully reveal many facets of Korea in the 1990s. There’s Yosep’s manager, Park, who stays one step ahead in business and takes care of packages from desperate fans: from roses to death threats, from decapitated dolls to poems written in blood. There’s Seongwuk, Ahnna’s nephew who shows up at the mansion with a gang of joyriding wannabe revolutionaries, and there are the sex workers who hustle among the down-and-out. Particularly in Park, Lee offers a portrait of discreet queerness that contrasts with the public desires of Mihee and other obsessive fans.
This wide cast of characters showcases the fictional seaside town of Eungrang. When asked about the choice to set Holy Boy in a fictional location in northern South Korea, Lee noted in an interview with Foyles bookshop that the imaginary place helped to create “more room for wilder imaginations.” The setting also emphasizes the “coexistence of entertainment and fear” in a landscape dotted with both vacation homes and military bases. Lee remarked that this place can “reveal South Korea’s duality: the birthplace of K-pop, yet a nation still living under a ceasefire.” Eungrang provides a subtle and eerie backdrop, at once fantastical and rundown. People are accustomed to bodies washing ashore, and there’s constant rain “like the noise in old Western films” which soaks “an arid land not with water but blood.”
In such phrases, Joheun Lee’s translation conveys a tone that moves between screwball and noir. It’s fitting for the high jinks and horrors of the plot, especially as the women turn on one another and fight to keep Yosep hostage a little longer. The translation is vivid yet unobtrusive, as in this phrase, in which “clear water” is a gently surreal term for “tears”: “A light headache swarmed over him, and clear water streamed down from his eyes.” This tonal range matches the novel’s formal modulations, from interview-style chapters to extended internal monologues and direct addresses to the reader.
Holy Boy first appeared in serialized form in the webzine Weekly Munhakdongne. Its episodic quality makes the most of surprising shifts that feel like enthusiastic improvisations. Lee is a writer who is able to suggest that the entire tale may have been a hallucination, or a lie, in ways that also affirm the reality of her characters and the trouble they keep getting into. She shows how “those in love plunge to their lowest place” with folly that readers will find both chilling and fun.
Writer 필자 소개
Zach Savich
Zach Savich is a prizewinning poet whose latest books are Momently (2024) and A Field of Telephones (2025). He teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art.
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