Review of THE GOOD SON by You-Jeong Jeong

3.5 Stars

I recently read Seven Years of Darkness by this Korean author (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2020/08/review-of-seven-years-of-darkness-by.html) and was intrigued enough by it to decide I’d read The Good Son, the first of her novels to be translated into English.

Twenty-six-year-old Yu-jin wakes up covered in blood and finds his mother’s body downstairs.  She was murdered by having her throat slit.  Because Yu-jin hasn’t been taking his medication he suffers seizures and their attendant memory loss.  Could he have killed his own mother?  He remembers nothing from the last six hours and so desperately tries to fill in the gaps as he also tries to figure out what to do since everything points to him as the murderer.

As Yu-jin pieces together the events that might have led to his mother’s death, the story becomes even darker and more disturbing than the beginning with its gruesome discoveries.  He discovers some shocking details about his mother, himself, and the past. 

It is obvious early on that Yu-jin is an unreliable narrator.  In the fourth paragraph, he admits, “honesty is neither my strong suit nor something I aspire to.”  He also says things like “I had always had a gift for reshaping a scene to make it comprehensible, though Mother disparaged this skill, calling it ‘lying’” and “They say that a normal person lies on average eighteen times an hour.  I probably come in a little higher than average, what with my difficulty with honesty.  My extra output makes me very good at it, able to spin any kind of story in a believable way.”  His propensity to lie is compounded by his faulty memory.

Much of the book focuses on Yu-jin’s relationship with his mother.  He begins by stating that his mother “treated me like a seat cushion – something to be suffocated and smothered.”  She stopped him from continuing in competitive swimming which he loved; he felt more comfortable in a pool than anywhere else because “It was the only place Mother couldn’t barge into; it was exclusively my world.”  She nagged him, constantly interrogated him about his whereabouts, gave him a curfew of 9 p.m., and strictly controlled his allowance:  “she might have thought:  he can’t do anything if he doesn’t have money.”  When his mother adopted Hae-jin, a friend of Yu-jin’s, she tended to favour the non-biological son. 

Yu-jin finds his mother’s journal, and it becomes key to helping him unravel the truth.  The journal entries lead to flashbacks to various time periods in the past.  There is perhaps too much reliance on these diary passages, but they are a relief from the claustrophobic effect of being inside Yu-jin’s mind.  The revelations are not really shocking because there are lots of clues which hint at the truth.

This is not a conventional whodunit, but it is compelling.  For me, the interest lay in wanting to know if my deductions were correct.  Readers should be warned that this book is not for the squeamish.  There are some brutally violent scenes that can only be described as soaked in blood and gore.