The Good Son by You-Jeong Jeong is a sharp and cunning South Korean psychological thriller that is bound to give you goosebumps and leave you wondering what a twisted place a human mind can be. You-Jeong has amazingly written the story from the point of view of Yu-Jin, the main character, who wakes up with a strange memory of things that happened before he went unconscious from a seizure. What is even more bizarre and unsettling is that he finds himself covered in blood, having no idea how he got himself in that mess. His bedsheets are also drenched in blood, and there are bloody footprints leading out of his room. Disoriented and puzzled, he follows the red trail down the stairs in his duplex apartment, to find his mother dead on the kitchen floor.
The story spans over three days, with Yu-Jin making sense of the fragments of his memory that feel like a dream but are real-life events of the night before. The answers to who murdered his mother and what really happened before that are like puzzle pieces he is trying to put together. He remembers coming home late last night, past his curfew at nine, and encountering his mother at the door. His mother asked him where he went and if he had taken his medicine. Yu-Jin is taking pills for epilepsy prescribed by his psychiatrist aunt, which he secretly doesn’t take because of its side effects. His mother is always worried about him when he stays out for too long, because she doesn’t want him to get a seizure on the street or anywhere where she is not there to pick him up. Having a vague sense of knowing what may have happened when he came home late last night, but not being hundred percent sure makes it hard to construct a proper narrative. He thinks about calling the police to report the murder, but he is afraid they may suspect him for the murder and won’t believe whatever he may tell them.
Yu-Jin has an adopted brother named Hae-Jin who is a year older than him. When the murder happened, he was on a trip for a film shooting, and Yu-Jin was the only one home. He doesn’t even want to risk telling Hae-Jin anything, because he would view him guilty when Yu-Jin can’t tell what exactly happened here. Yu-Jin tries to put together the snippets of his memory, yet none of the order of events he conjures up make sense. There is a huge gap between midnight till half past two in the morning. There is evidence around the house that tells a story, like his mother’s wet shoes, the locked door, the entire kitchen is clean even though there is a dead body, and the walls at the landing that are haphazardly painted with blood.
What keeps you glued to the story is an unreliable narrator, Yu-Jin, who is tangled up in illusion, mystery, lies, and half-truths. He seems to have repressed his memory of last night’s events, while being haunted with these random clips of a story that may be real or imagined. Hae-Jin returns home and he asks about their mother. The novel uses flashback scenes to tell the backstory. You get to know what the relationship was like between Yu-Jin and his mother, his biological brother Yu-Min who died tragically, and his Auntie Hye-Won. This brings into light Yu-Jin’s reserved and almost antisocial personality, his passion for swimming, his shortcomings in comparison to Yu-Min, and his mental disorder.
What is interesting to read is that as a protagonist, Yu-Jin is not a typical hero character. He is on a journey to find the truth about his mother’s murder that takes him back to his childhood and life experiences that changed him into who he has become as a twenty-five year old adult. There are scenes when you think you finally know what happened last night, only to doubt that it may not be entirely true, or there is a missing puzzle. You are inside Yu-Jin’s head, believing what he tells you about himself and others to be true. You feel he could be telling the truth, yet you keep doubting his narrative. Amidst this ordeal, there is a local news report on a dead body of a girl found in the sea, that is closeby Yu-Jin’s apartment building. This confirms the niggling notion that there is a killer on loose in the town, who has also murdered his mother. But he can’t be sure until he remembers the events of last night.
The trauma, repressed memory, shock, and cluelessness makes this a riveting novel where you desperately want to know the truth. You keep guessing and connecting the dots. The author has created a remarkable story filled with clever twists, character depth, family dynamics with mystery that is not resolved until the last page. It gives you goosebumps the way Yu-Jin narrates the story, and how he deals with the murder of his mother. You may hate him, feel sympathetic towards him, or not feel anything for him because he is a very multifaceted character that makes you ponder. He is lonely, misunderstood, made to feel unintelligent and weird, an outcast, yet attractive because of his quiet and reserved nature. Being in Yu-Jin’s shoes, you view the world and his family relations through his perspective. This single point of view can make it hard to separate truth from lies. It is interesting that his mother’s perspective is shared through her diary where she recorded her thoughts about Yu-Jin and her family. The story gets ever more engrossing when you have two people’s point of views narrating the same life events from two different angles. The mother is dead yet she still has a voice through her diary.
Yu-Jin’s personality and his internal conflicts are portrayed really well, with fine sensory details of his disturbed state of mind. This novel has a jaw-dropping plot twist which you
may have expected but you were not so sure. More than an entertaining and riveting fiction plot, this makes you think about the types of people you live around. Most of the time how people appear to be is not how they exactly are when no one is watching them. What you may think about yourself is different from how someone else views you. This is how Yu-Jin as a narrator comes across in the book. The ending may surprise you or you may have an ‘Aha, I knew it’ moment. There is also an epilogue. The resolution may make you feel unsettled and may make you wish for the opposite of how things went. All in all, this book is a masterpiece in every aspect. It will leave some sort of impact on you and definitely make you think.