My Goodreads review: Small Gods of Calamity

[ankh_hpl]

Small Gods of Calamity by Sam Kyung Yoo

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Thanks to NetGalley for supplying me with an ARC of this novella, in exchange for an honest review.]


This tight, effective combination of urban fantasy and police (paranormal) investigation packs a lot into well under 200 pages. Very little of that is anything I've encountered before in my fantasy reading, which has been centered on Western spirituality / mythology. What I found here was full-on immersion into Korean spiritual tradition. Many of the general problems -- possession, protection from malign sprits, exorcism -- were familiar, but the specifics were entirely new to me. Much of the vocabulary was, as well, which led to much use of my Kindle's Wikipedia function. This worked fine, though a short glossary in some future edition could be helpful..

The plot itself -- which is only one part of this complex and satisfying narrative -- concerns Seoul's only spirit detective, Kim Han-gil. When his work with his department's violent crimes unit leads him to a series of suspicious suicides, he and his bewildered new partner are drawn into the evolving tragedy of a worm spirit infestation. Worse, Han-gil has seen such horrors before. One of them killed his mother, a powerful shaman.

When Han-gil discovers that his mother's last client (whom he blames for her death) is his best hope of cracking the case, the action really begins. The tangled threads of his spiritually complicated past must be woven into a solution his superiors aren't crazy about backing -- and that his partner barely believes in. All this takes place in a modern city, where exorcisms take place after hours in borrowed medical clinics, and consulting practitioners travel at the request of powerful families.

There's a lot of interpersonal drama here, but it never gets in the way of the chills -- which are frequent and occasionally graphic. I had the feeling that there could have been a novel here, or that there was one forthcoming. For now, however, this right-sized Korean occult investigation is a treat for any urban fantasy reader looking for something fresh.




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