Holy Boy

One Idol.
Four Fans.
A Bloody Mess.

‘Yosep was the only thing in her world.’

A K-Pop idol with legions of adoring disciples, Yosep, is the fallen angel of the music industry. Impossibly beautiful, his perfection inspires a near-religious devotion in his fans. But for an elect few, this dedication will spill over into delusion.

Four fans – Mihee, Nami, Heeae and their ringleader Ahnna – hatch a plot to satiate their shared hunger: kidnap.

Plagued by paranoia, and with their grip on reality slowly loosening, the women use increasingly disturbing strategies to keep Yosep in their possession. As they plunge into a hallucinatory hellfire of betrayal and murder in the name of their beloved, the group threaten to drag this young angel into the flames with them . . .

Holy Boy is a thrilling novel that defies expectations until the final page with its deadly puzzle-box of literary tricks. An astonishing indictment of contemporary celebrity and parasocial desire, Holy Boy is the tale of one life told through the bloody kaleidoscope of unstoppable obsession.

Translated from the Korean by Joheun Lee.