Review of God Disease byAn Chang Joon

*God-Disease* by An Chang Joon (2025). Published by Sarabande Books.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

As a book blogger, something I’ve always been super clear about and dedicated towards promoting are local libraries. I know having access to a good library is a privilege, and there are countries where people don’t really have access to books at all. I am so grateful every day that I have access to a decent library system, especially in today’s world.

I truly like buying books when I can, but when money is tight and room is limited, I stick to the library. I think libraries are such an incredible free resource here in the United States, and we take them for granted because a lot of Americans can’t fathom that most countries don’t have this much access to books, movies, and so much more openly.

I have a routine when I go to the library, too. I always go to the new fiction section first, and that’s where I tend to pick the most books up during a trip. I have a tendency to read new fiction versus older fiction, but when I find a Wharton or Fitzgerald in the regular stacks I tend to gravitate towards them as well.

It was in the new fiction stack that I saw the spine of God Disease and was intrigued by the title. It was the synopsis that drew me in, and I ended up reading all of it while I was on a trip to Washington D.C. with a good friend of mine. It’s a pretty quick read, if we’re being honest, but I was having fun with it so it also flew by.

Let’s get into the review!

A collection of short stories about liminal spaces, what lies beyond, and identity.

As I wrote above, this is a collection of short stories. From the original synopsis alone, I was imagining this would be going more into horror territory, but I was very wrong about that. This was not like Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, but some of the events depicted in these stories are a bit horrific.

Each of the stories contained with this little book’s pages lean on tragedy at times. In “Structural Failures,” for example, a young woman passes her civil service exam and lands a government position. Civil service in Korea is highly competitive, and each day she goes back to her little goshiwon (a tiny room that students often rent) to rest and then do it all over again. She doubts the path she has taken, even though it seemed like this is what her life had led up to until now.

She could afford to probably leave the goshiwon, which is definitely against building regulations and probably is illegal to live inside of due to a lack of safety. However, by the story’s end, a different goshiwon dormitory collapses and her friend is missing, leading the main character to realize that her good friend might actually be under the rubble.

This compliments the titular story “God-Disease” in an unexpected way for me, as its protagonist is trying to learn what happened to their mother. Their mother disappeared after contracting god-disease and going mad, so they return to South Korea in order to find her. Now in a rural Korean town at a museum where some of their coworkers hate them, they go to every mudang (a spiritual medium) in town to try and figure out what happened to their mother.

But as they unravel the thread of what could’ve been, they discover that they, too, might be succumbing to the same madness that once consumed their mother. This story really embodies what I was sensing from this collection—these stories and their characters exist in these liminal spaces, something that isn’t entirely Korean or American.

This I get as someone who also is a diaspora writer, although I am not Korean. These stories are seeped in Korean culture and are often set in Korea, but some of their characters are Korean American, or deeply question the system in place that they’re living under.

“Autophagy” is another story, and the last one I’ll discuss, that really stood out to me. Every story in this collection is solid, but Autophagy struck me because it mirrors “God-Disease.” Its main character tries to expose corruption and is sent to the countryside, where their new colleagues openly resent the fact they’re from Seoul and have a degree from a top Korean university.

This is similar to “God-Disease” when the main character is hated by another coworker because they were from the United States. These hierarchies are pretty obvious to me in these stories, showing how entire communities, especially in rural Korea, are feeling like they’re left behind. The infrastructure is falling apart all around them, but when someone comes to actually help, they become a threat in some ways.

Overall Thoughts

This was such a unique collection of short stories, and I was deeply impressed by the writing and restaint that was seen throughout these stories. Writing is truly a craft and while I had not heard of this author before I randomly picked this book up on a lonely Friday afternoon, I found these stories left an impression on me.

And a smaller anecdote is that I finally learned was a mudang was, and ironically during my Korean tutoring sessions a week later my tutor asked if I knew who mudang were and I was able to say yes because of this book! That’s an interesting intersection between my real and bookish lives.

I really enjoyed this collection, and could see why it was billed as a Korean Southern Gothic. I was literally looking up An Chang Joon’s other work online to see if there was more published from them—I think they’re an author I’m going to keep an eye on in the future.

Go pick this one up from your local library or indie bookseller when you get the chance. If the synopsis is calling to you, then I think this might definitely be worth checking out at least once. Give it a chance, read three stories before deciding to continue or not.

Find me on Instagram, Goodreads, and Letterboxd for more.