[INTERVIEW] 'As humans, we all have a dark side'

Jeong You-jeong, author of best-seller "Perfect Happiness," pose during a Korea Times interview at the Seoul-based publishing house EunHaengNaMu headquarters on Wednesday. Korea Times photo by Kang Hyun-kyung

Contrary to the title of her new bestseller, Korea's irreplaceable thriller author Jeong You-jeong says, like it or not, life is full of both good and bad things

By Kang Hyun-kyung

Bestselling author Jeong You-jeong's new psychological thriller, "Perfect Happiness," unravels the darkest side of human nature, taking readers into a chilling and haunting world.

Some of the moments are described so vividly, with meticulous attention to details, that readers find themselves frightened as they visualize the gruesome scenes.

With the author's captivating storytelling that keeps readers turning the pages to fulfill their curiosity about who did what and why, this crime novel has become a great summertime read and has topped the Kyobo Books' bestseller list.

Jeong said she used several different "literary devices" to keep her readers glued to her story. One of the secrets she shared is to use both real and fictional names of cities and other places in her novels.

In "Perfect Happiness," the Half Moon Marsh is one of the fictional places the bestselling author paid great attention to creating.

"It symbolizes the inner side of protagonist Yuna," she said during a recent Korea Times interview at the headquarters of Seoul-based publishing house, EunHaengNaMu Publishing Co. "The marsh is her world. Common loons, which are mentioned several times in the novel, live there. She feeds the animals mysterious meats she procures herself. In the novel, there's a part narrated by her daughter, Ji-U, 'Mother is good at making food for the waterbirds.' Some avid readers will instantly grasp what this reference means: the protagonist is a murderer. This novel directly deals with a murder case from the outset."

Jeong said that the functions of real cities and fictional places in her novel are different. Providing real place names makes her story realistic, while fictional places were created to dramatize her stories.

In "Perfect Happiness," Jeong plays a psychological game with readers from the very beginning.

The crime novel starts with the protagonist, Yuna, a self-absorbed, cold-blooded, and fatally-attractive woman, skillfully cutting "unspecified" types of meat into pieces and separating the flesh from the bones, using several knives designed for different purposes, to feed the loons living in the nearby marsh. The suspicious scene draws readers into the story as they seek to figure out what kind of meat the protagonist is cutting up.

Yuna has a narcissistic disorder and is prone to illusions. The dangerously apathetic woman attempts to eliminate anything she believes stands in the way of her blind pursuit of pure happiness.

Unlike her character, Jeong said that she is a realist and doesn't believe that there is such a thing as pure happiness.

"Things like unhappiness, deficiencies or tragedies are all part of our lives. If there were to be anyone, like my character Yuna, who were to pursue a life free of these negativities, I think they would be delusional at best. I named the marsh, 'Half Moon,' because she denies the other half of our life, which is packed with trials and tribulations that put our patience to the test. The name indicates that she and her world can never be as complete as the full moon, because she is preoccupied with the unrealistic notion that she can control her life to make it perfectly happy," she said.

Loons are another critical creature that make "Perfect Happiness" into a chilling thriller.

The wailing of the loons is described in several catastrophic scenes. In the novel, the way the wild animals call each other serves as a precursor to looming tragedies involving characters surrounding the protagonist.

"Water birds are animals that are mostly found in marshes. I did research on the sounds of dozens of different water birds, such as ducks and grebes, and chose to use common loons in my work, because their unique sound best fits the creature that I was to portray. Their sound reminds me of the howling of wolves," she said.

She turned to her smartphone to teach this reporter how loons call each other.

"Quite peculiar, isn't it?" she asked after turning on a YouTube video featuring the sound of common loons.

"Perfect Happiness" by Jeong You-jeong

Among other characters, she said that she put in a lot of effort to create the protagonist's 10-year-old daughter, Ji-U, who is a timid, meticulous girl as well as a victim of gaslighting by her narcissistic mother.

"I tried to figure out how that little girl would feel in certain circumstances if I had been her, and to portray what's deep in her heart. She had to be a strong girl because she is such an important character in the novel," she said.

"Perfect Happiness" became an instant bestseller as soon as it was officially released in online and offline bookstores.

The first 5,000 copies sold out immediately. She kept her promise that she would autograph the first 5,000 copies as a token of her gratitude to her loyal fans.

"Perfect Happiness" is Jeong's sixth book and another bestselling thriller. Several of her books have been adapted into movies. Her name went global in 2015 when "Seven Years of Darkness" was listed as one of the top 10 crime novels, ranked by the German newspaper, Die Zeit. "The Good Son," another thriller written by Jeong, was translated into English, enabling her to build a fan base in the United States and United Kingdom.

Due to her novels' continued commercial successes at home and abroad, Jeong earned the nickname, "Korea's irreplaceable thriller writer."

Jeong said that she owes a lot to U.S. horror, suspense thriller, crime novel author Stephen King for her success. Calling King her literary mentor, she said he is also her role model.

"He has published over 50 long works of fiction. Many of them have been translated into Korean, but some haven't been. I read all of them. I am such an avid reader of Stephen King's works that I have almost memorized them," she said.

As a self-taught thriller author, she said, King's novels were a guiding light to her pre-debut self-training as a writer, when she was practicing developing her own writing style.

"I've never taken any literary courses or writing classes. Thus, it's fair to call me an autodidact in the literary world. I analyzed every one of his book plots, to figure out how he created them and developed the stories," she said. "I was told that he didn't intend to make plots before writing. If this is true, I think he is a real genius."

After years of self-learning and honing her writing skills with King's suspense thrillers, Jeong made her literary debut in 2007 with the award-winning book, "My Life's Spring Camp."

Asked how she wanted to be remembered as a writer, she said she hopes to be Korea's best storyteller.

This goal, she said, doesn't mean that she is trying to curry favors with readers. Her works, which have paved her way to stardom in the literary world, are thrillers and crime novels that shed light on the darkest sides of human nature. Such topics, she said, are hard to make appealing to some readers, as they feel uncomfortable about them.

"But such topics indeed fascinate me. That's my style," she said. "There are novelists who write about happiness, or the joy of small things, and some are brilliantly great at that. But I am not that kind of person. As humans, we all have a dark side and some don't want to share or talk about it with others… As a writer, I think my job is creating stories that are captivating enough to draw the attention of readers who initially don't like the topics."

Jeong said she already has a topic for her next novel and will work on that soon.