Guest post written by And The River Drags Her Down author Jihyun Yun
Jihyun Yun (she/her) is a Korean American writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. A recipient of various grants and fellowships, she received her BA in Psychology from UC Davis, and her MFA from New York University. Her Prairie Schooner Prize winning poetry collection SOME ARE ALWAYS HUNGRY was published by The University of Nebraska Press in September 2020. Her debut young adult novel AND THE RIVER DRAGS HER DOWN is forthcoming with Knopf BFYR in October 2025. Originally from California, she now resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
About And The River Drags Her Down: She has always known the rules – never resurrect anything larger than the palm of her hand, but that was before her sister died. A chilling, compulsive exploration of sisterhood, loss, and revenge. Out October 9th in the UK and October 7th in the US. PLUS you can check out an excerpt from the audiobook at the end of the guest post!
As an author whose debut horror novel is coming out very soon, I absolutely jumped at the chance to shout about some of my favorite horror and horror adjacent things across media. Bear with me—as horror is wont to do, it’s going to get a little weird (and don’t we all love that?)
They Bloom At Night by Trang Thanh Tran
Since my book is a YA novel, I would be remiss to not begin with some recent YA horrors I loved. I don’t know if it’s about my general mounting climate anxiety, but I’ve been very obsessed with oceanic/waterlogged horrors lately: Private Rites by Julia Armfield, Those We Drown by Amy Goldsmith, and now this one, by Trang Thanh Tran.
Let me briefly set the scene: after a devastating hurricane, the town of Mercy, Louisiana is beset by strange red algae blooms which is causing the local wildlife to mutate. Here, the main character Nhung is coerced by a local crime boss to capture one of these creatures so he can add it to his sketchy sea emporium.
This book is a triumph, braiding together so many themes—queerness, the inability of parents to truly face their children, grief, climate change—all made more stark in this post-apocalyptic landscape that strips the interpersonal interactions raw because the decorum of day-to-day life and societal expectations have broken down. It also meditates on the way some might find comfort in this rupture.
They Bloom at Night is only Tran’s second book, but it’s cemented their spot as an auto-buy author for me.
That Which Feeds Us by Keala Kendall
This book isn’t out until Summer 2026 (and as of me writing this list, it doesn’t even yet have a cover) so I won’t say too much other than: if you love YA gothic horror, this needs to be on your radar. It follows a diaspora Native Hawaiian teen who returns to her homeland in search of her missing twin sister. The search leads her to an ultra-exclusive luxury resort for the 1% that is built atop an old plantation, and things quickly turn insidious from there.
Lush, muscular prose with strong anticolonial themes—a winner all around. I can’t wait for others to experience this book.
One Hand to Hold One Hand to Carve by m.shaw
A cadaver split vertically into halves wakes up on a mortuary table—Left and Right. They escape from the mortuary, holding their bisected, formaldehyde-soaked selves together and try to remake a life on the outside, even as their personalities and desires for the future begin to diverge.
This is truly one of those books that is best read knowing very little going in, so I will leave it at that. This is magical realism at its weirdest, and an absolute fever dream of a horror novel.
A Tale of Two Sisters
I absolutely love horror novels—it’s one of my favorite genres—but I’m very much a wimp when it comes to visual horror of any kind. Though I watched it between my splayed fingers, I make an exception for A Tale of Two Sisters, the 2003 Korean horror movie directed by Kim Jee Woon. The title of the movie, in Korean, directly translates to Rose Flower, Red Lotus (Janghwa, Hongryeon) after the Joseon dynasty era Korean folk tale of the same name of which this is a retelling.
In this tale, two sisters, Sumi and Moohyeon, return to their home after some time institutionalized but have trouble reintegrating with their emotionally neglectful father and cold stepmother. Soon enough, strange happenings begin to occur around the home, suggesting that it may be haunted. This movie is a psychological horror that leans more toward the device of dread and premonition rather than violence or jump scares (though there are certainly some of those as well!) It’s also a film I really admire for its complex emotional landscape and how it integrates grief into every aspect of the film—the way loss can sharpen like a blade. Can cut and turn inward. AND THE RIVER DRAGS HER DOWN is also based on the same folktale that this movie was, and it interrogates much the same themes.
Also, the cinematography is gorgeous.
Octopath Traveler 2
This is not really a horror, but I can’t help but recommend it here. Octopath Traveler 2 is an RPG by Square Enix where you play as a group of eight travelers who band together as a party, but still each have their own unique independent storylines.
Something I absolutely delight in is when a piece of media begins as one thing and suddenly detours sharply out of the parameters it has set up for consumers to expect. That’s what this game does on occasion.
It is, for the most part, a cozy and heartfelt fantasy game with nostalgic 16-bit graphics. But occasionally, it takes an unexpected dip into the nightmarish. An NPC sprite will generate beneath a lakeside pagoda, only for you to go there and find them gone—a ghost offered without explanation. You’ll come across a haunted house and the cheery music will come to a halt. Inside, paintings of the mansion’s former tenants have been defaced, slashed across the eyes. You talk to a bedraggled NPC who is spouting word salad, but when you extract only the randomly capitalized letters, it spells out: HELP ME. You later find out they’re possessed.
It’s the unexpectedness that makes these moments feel more spine-chilling.
The creepy side of Ahn Ye Eun’s discography
Ahn Ye-Eun is a Korean musician known for blending Korean traditional folk (mostly a musical storytelling style called Pansori) with pop. I feel like she’s most known for her folk ballads, but I love her most when she leans a little into her creepy side.
This first song “Changgwi” is about the eponymous spiteful ghost of a person who has been killed by a tiger and must serve said tiger until it’s able to lure another hapless soul to take its place.
This second one, “지박,” which translates roughly to “that which lingers or causes to linger” is from the perspective of a ghost warning intruders to leave the house it is haunting. The music video is nightmare fuel, but beyond the scary visuals, I’m so fascinated by the song’s hybridity. Both of the marriage between folk and the modern, but also the tension between menace and playfulness in the melody.
Audiobook out October 7th from Penguin Random House
