BOOK REVIEW - “MOLKA" DRAGS US INTO VOYUERISM IN THIS PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER

What’s more horrific than watching someone take a dump? Really, only one other thing: the idea that there are people out there who videotape unsuspecting women doing it to satisfy some weird fetish.

Monika Kim’s new novel, MOLKA, brings this twisted world to life. The story follows two intertwining narratives. One is an IT technician named Junyoung who uses his system to watch his female coworkers using the bathroom during their workday. The second is Dahye, an ordinary woman whose life is thrown into disarray when a sex tape of her is leaked to the public. The two seemingly unrelated narrative arcs cast downward into grizzly tales of excessive stalking and fiery passion for revenge. As the great Bob Pollard once sang: “parallel lines on a slow decline.”

Kim lays everything out in the beginning, opting to lead the novel with an author’s note rather than tuck it in the back. The author explains the history of the term, ‘molka,’ which was used in South Korea to describe "spy cameras secretly and illegally installed, often to capture voyeuristic images and videos." She also describes the rampant use of this invasive equipment, and how its legal consequences (or lack thereof) make this one of the most horrifically misogynistic injustices since Aristotle’s “Biology of Inferiority.”

Kim uses her sophomore novel to provide an example of her points. The book’s strength is built on its precise characterizations. Junyoung is the perfect character study for the incel creep whose favorite thing to watch on television takes place inside a porta-potty. As his ghoulish obsession with Dahye progresses, so too does the reader’s understanding of how monsters are made.

Dahye, meanwhile, shines as a victim seeking to take back her dignity through calculated revenge. Her pain is so raw, yet it allows her to shed the delicate nature of her former self and turn into a hardened badass straight from a Tarantino revenge flick. All this culminates to a graphic, violent end that showcases the humorless irony Kim’s book intended to present.

This book is pitch black; there are very few bright spots in the narrative. But it's an important social commentary, and a chilling representation of society’s darker secrets. Also, there’s a scene in which someone’s penis is violently chopped off, but even as a man myself, I’m not finding that to be as horrific as it once was if it happens to certain people.

Stay tuned for more book reviews! Big thanks to NetGalley, Penguin Random House, and Erewhon Books for the ARC.