Review of The New Seoul Park Jelly Massacre by Cho Ye-eun

*The New Seoul Park Jelly Massacre* by Cho Ye-eun, translated by Yewon Jung (2019). Published by Honford Star.

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.

This blog post is interesting to me because lately, I’ve been struggling to get in my reading time. I was working for the longest time as a freelancer and contractor, but recently pivoted to an 8-5 job where I’m in an office. It’s not hybrid, so I’m always at home trying to put the puzzle pieces together of how I’ll get my reading done. I also continue working on this blog when I’m not at work, so the Instagram reels I’m fed about a 5-9 feel too real right now.

Anyways, I am trying to find that time to read here and there. Somehow I’m still on track for my Goodreads goal, even though I’ve been slowly giving up on the notion of reading goals in life. I think they can be a little too much pressure and takes the fun off of reading at the end of the day, and I want to read because I want to stay in touch with literature while also pursuing my side career as a writer.

The New Seoul Park Jelly Massacre is a book I’ve been wanting to read for a while. In the summer of 2024 I was living in Busan for Korean language training, and I was at a Kyobo Books and literally about to buy this book until I saw the English version was 28,000 won. I could not justify dropping that much on the book at the time, and I was devastated to put it back in the moment.

Fast forward a year later, and I was thinking about it and decided to take the plunge. A big part of getting myself to read during this time has been finding books that I’m genuinely really interested in, as it means I want to be excited enough to pick it up and continue where I left off. This book I actually ended up reading in one sitting!

Let’s get into the review. I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction.

Multiple perspectives of a massacre—one where people turn into jelly—at a Seoul amusement park.

This is a book that’s technically a collection of stories, but they revolve around a singular event. I can see why the author chose to structure this book the way they did after reading through all of the stories, as it kind of serves as a kaleidoscope of sorts on not only what happened here (and how it happened), but the people and the choices they make.

The first story is about a young girl going to the New Soul Park with her parents. Her parents are about to get a divorce, which she doesn’t really officially know yet because they haven’t told her, but the warning signs are there. When her parents lose her, a mysterious man offers her a jelly sample, and she joins up with another lost girl who ran away from her mother.

When the first girl spots her new friend not getting along with her mother, she slips the jelly into the girl’s drink, as she remembers the jelly guy told her that the jelly will allow people to never be separated again. Much to her horror, when the girl consumes the drink, she turns into a massive blob of jelly along with her mother.

Thus begins the core event central to the book: the New Seoul Park jelly massacre. These weren’t the only people who were handed out jelly at the amusement park, and people all around them are turning into jelly. Whether it’s a couple where the girl doesn’t want the guy to break up with her and leave, or a disgruntled mascot who takes off his head and realizes everyone him has turned into jelly, there’s a lot to learn about what happened here.

One of the more interesting perspectives in this book is from a woman high up at a cleaning company. Turns out she’s in a cult and in on the jelly experiment, and she sees the act of consuming the jelly as a way to get closer to god. A bit messed up as to how they sucked so many other people into it, but as we see from the book, it’s not as simple as describing it like this.

There’s also a cat that lived in the home that was razed in order for the park to be made. He kind of just wanders the park looking for ways to fill his days, and he witnesses the jelly massacre from afar. His perspective was also really interesting to me because not only is this cat ancient and seen Korea gentrify, but he serves as a through line as to why all of these stories are deeply connected, even if the characters did not know each other upfront.

Overall Thoughts

I’m a bit biased because I did my master’s thesis on Korean women’s literature, but I find Korean literature, especially when it’s written by women, to be so compelling because of how it looks at contemporary society and critiques it. I know Japanese and Korean women’s literature, specifically modern women authors in translation, is becoming more trendy along with healing fiction, but books like The New Seoul Park Jelly Massacre offer really interesting insight.

I think the structure of viewing a singular event from different perspectives is a valuable way to go about this story specifically, especially considering we have kids, a scorned lover, a wealthy businesswoman, employees just trying to make a paycheck, and a cat who’s seen a lot of events during its lifetime. That’s a pretty diverse way of looking at the current problems reflected by the jelly massacre.

I did find the translation to be a little bit clunky at times, but couldn’t tell if it was because of the writing or the translation itself. It was more apparent in some of the stories, but not others. Overall though I did enjoy the experience of reading this novel.

Pick it up if you have the chance! If it interests you then it might be worth trying to read at least once.

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