Molka
Junyoung has rigged an ordinary Seoul office building with hidden cameras, watching the women who work there without their knowledge. It is a habit that has become an appetite, and the woman it settles on is Dahye, still raw from her sister's drowning and only beginning to feel steady again.
Dahye is dating Hyukjoon, the son of a wealthy media family, and for a while the relationship looks like the good fortune she has been owed. Then footage of her, taken without her consent, starts circulating online along with a wider camera scandal reaching into the city's elite. Hyukjoon leaves. Her parents turn on her. She starts seeing her dead sister in empty rooms.
As the source of the footage traces back toward Junyoung, Dahye stops absorbing the blame and starts working out how to make him answer for it, whatever that costs her.
Molka is Monika Kim's second novel after The Eyes Are the Best Part. It keeps the same register: a horror novel built on a real and ongoing crisis, angry rather than squeamish, with a supernatural thread running under the violence. It is bleak, propulsive reading, more interested in reckoning than in comfort.
A young office worker whose leaked intimate video and family fallout push her toward reckoning with the man responsible.
An IT support worker at Dahye's company who secretly plants hidden cameras around the office, including in the women's restroom.
Dahye's boyfriend, the son of a wealthy media family, who disappears once the leaked footage becomes a public scandal.
Dahye's late sister, who drowned years earlier and begins appearing to her as she reckons with what happened.
A loyal friend who stays close to Dahye as the scandal unravels her life.
"Molka" is Korean for hidden or spy cameras. The novel takes its title from a real, ongoing crisis in South Korea, where hidden cameras have been used to secretly film and distribute non-consensual footage of women, and it builds its horror story directly on top of that epidemic rather than a fictional stand-in for it.
No. Molka is Kim's second novel after The Eyes Are the Best Part, but it is a standalone story with its own cast and setting, not a sequel or part of a series.