The Eyes Are the Best Part
The Eyes Are the Best Part is Monika Kim's 2024 debut, a visceral horror novel about a family unravelling and a young woman's appetite that grows alongside it. Ji-won is a Korean-American college freshman in California, newly cast as the head of her household after her father abandons the family for another woman. Her mother is barely coping, her teenage sister needs looking after, and into this fragile home comes George — her mother's smug new white boyfriend, whose pale blue eyes Ji-won cannot stop thinking about.
What begins as an intrusive fixation deepens into a hunger: vivid, dreamlike, and eventually unstoppable. Kim braids body horror and psychological unease with a razor-edged critique of misogyny, the fetishization of Asian women, and the disorientation of living between two cultures.
Frequently described as a "good for her" revenge story, it is a slim, unsettling, blackly funny book about grief, rage, and the monstrous places a family in crisis can push a person toward. Readers sensitive to graphic violence, gore, and cannibalism should approach with care.
Korean-American college freshman and unreliable narrator who becomes head of the household after her father leaves; her growing obsession with eyes, sparked by her mother's new boyfriend George, curdles into a violent hunger.
The mother's condescending, entitled new white boyfriend, whose pale blue eyes fixate Ji-won's dark cravings.
Ji-won's overwhelmed immigrant mother, working at a grocery store and barely holding the family together after her husband leaves.
Ji-won's fifteen-year-old younger sister.
Ji-won's father, who deserts the family for another woman, triggering its collapse.
The author drew from her own upbringing and family history, specifically incorporating Korean superstitions and culinary traditions like the consumption of fish eyes that she learned from her mother.
The novel was a Sunday Times bestseller and received the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel.