Cracks

Horror and myth collide when a Korean American teenager's grief summons something a water ghost that has been feeding on her family's sorrow for decades.

Dark strands of hair crack the corners of my sight, suspended as always in the air, spidering and floating as if in liquid. Mul-gwishin. Water ghost.

Gracie Russell feels she belongs nowhere. In suburban 1990s Washington, she is constantly at sea—struggling with her biracial identity, her father's violent alcoholism, and her mother's looming mortality. When Ji-eun dies, Gracie will lose her last chance to mend their relationship. But she can already feel her mother slipping away, pulled by the tides of memory back to authoritarian 1970s South Korea. The secret she buried there has awakened something in the deep. And now it is rising.

As Ji-eun's body weakens and the autumn rains fall in torrents, the sound of dripping water haunts Gracie. Cracks form in the basement wall, exposing a crumbling passageway to a sea of liquid darkness, and Gracie is running out of time. The mul-gwishin is coming for her.

For readers of Catriona Ward and Han Kang, Cracks is a harrowing vision of heritage, violence, and the histories that possess.