Having read Molka by Monika Kim earlier this year, I had to figure out what the hype around The Eyes are the Best Part was about. I am super late to the party, but I have arrived.
Monika Kim writes at this curious intersection of female rage and horror that would have you questioning what the real horror element actually is in the book in the best way possible. With that, let’s get into it!
The Plot of “The Eyes are the Best Part”: What is this Korean-American Horror about?
The story is told from Ji-Won’s perspective, a second-generation Korean American growing up in California who has just entered college. She has a 15-year-old sister, Ji-Hyun and their mother. The story begins when their father walks out on his family to start a new family of his own.
Having depended on her husband all her life, their mother is inconsolable. While she goes through her cycle of grief, as a family, they are all waiting for the father to return. The opening scene of their mother eating a fish eye to bring luck shapes the whole narrative.
As the mother finds a white man to marry, George, the racial dynamics of openly fetishising Asian women is discussed in depth. Monika Kim keeps the critique subtle until she calls out the behaviour outright. The racial dichotomy between white people, Koreans and Black people is woven into the narrative seamlessly to not even hint at preaching.
George is exploiting their mother, both daughters are hyper-aware of this fact while the mother doesn’t suspect anything. Dealing with her own abandonment issues, she grabs onto George and starts planning a wedding. While George leers at the daughters and the servers of Asian restaurants, the mother is completely consumed by her need for male validation in life.
Ji-Won takes up her role as the eldest daughter and arms herself to protect her family. But the fish eye she had eaten to appease her mother has awoken a strange hunger in her. This hunger for eyes now encompasses blue male human eyes.
George’s eyes are blue.
While Ji-Won is clear-eyed about the trap her mother is blind to, she is not so suave to assess the threat in her so-called friend Geoffrey. He reads feminist literature, argues against free will and quotes philosophers at her. Ji-Won thinks him a real friend until her other friend, Alexis, who she is smitten with, points out what a creep Geoffrey really is. As she distances herself from him, she starts to get stalked. She is not an innocent in life, she lied, manipulated and clawed through life. But this is all because she refuses to be a victim in her own story.
Parallel to these developments in life, Ji-Won sinks into a sort of dreamscape. She is dreaming of a room filled with blue eyes on the wall and the only way out is eating those eyes. She is walking up in the middle of the night in front of the refrigerator, biting into an uncooked egg. But most of all, she is dreaming of killing George and eating his eyes.
Beware gruesome murders, racially derogatory comments and toxic parents in The Eyes are the Best Part.
My Verdict: Should You Read this Horror Phenomena?
The very Korean concept of palja, fate, is the axis this story pivots around. Ji-Won’s father had always blamed his broken fate to the point it makes Ji-Hyun question if there’s a curse on the bloodline. Maybe their father leaves to escape this curse after all.
Ji-Won doesn’t get into her top school despite having all the required credits, this collapses her social circle and pushes her to isolation. Ji-Hyun gets stuck mourning a father she loves because he chose the new family over them.
Their mother chooses to stay behind when her parents and, later, siblings leave the village for better opportunities, she starves for more than food. It is easy to look at her pathetic self and blame her for her own situation, but it is important to look at the real issues caused by decisions men made that toppled her life, time and again.
There are no jump scares in the book. In a style now typical of Monika Kim, she makes the men of the story the scary element. The atmosphere is chilling in its ordinariness; this could be happening to any of us. The dismissal by white men of little frail Asian women captures the female rage from a distinct perspective. Ji-Won being obsessed with Alexis captures the fascination of Asian people with Black women; we have all seen those videos of Black women being pestered for selfies in China and South Korea.
I, however, would categorise this book more as a feminist thriller than horror.
The graphic details of eating the eyes, the anticipation of it and then the reality of it, are perfectly gruesome for this body horror. I, personally, did not feel the atmosphere build. I might have had too high expectations from this and going in neutral would definitely let the pros of this book shine better.
However, I did not understand the inclusion of Alexis in terms of the plot. Additionally, the queer yearning served no purpose in the book. Ji-Won could have just gotten involved with her studies more to distance herself from Geoffrey and there was no real heat behind Geoffrey’s antagonism for Alexis. This latter feels like such a missed opportunity.
The audacity of men and the eerie dreams were more on the level of gross than horror. Even though the cannibalism was meant to be pretty eerie, it stayed at a solid gross for me. The writing it vividly descriptive, I put down the book and have images seared into my brain like I just watched it all play out on a screen. The readers are invited to be surprised at every turn at the levels men would stoop to only to mask their racism under fetishising Asian women, however, if you are a woman, you wouldn’t be too surprised. There are plot holes in framing someone else for Ji-Won’s crimes and playing mind games with George, but the overall narrative makes up for it.
This book was a 4-star read for me. But that is mostly because I read Molka before I read The Eyes are the Best Part and Monika Kim has gotten better at her craft with her latter release.
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