Loneliness and responsibility devastate the older sister, Mirae. Grief and a magical power motivate the younger sister, Soojin. The combination is nothing less than miraculous and destructive.

And the River Drags Her Down, the new young adult horror novel by Ann Arbor's Jihyun Yun, retells a Korean folktale in a fictional coastal resort town called Jade Acre. Water and all its possibilities will never seem the same after reading it.

The Han sisters possess a unique gift. They can bring back dead creatures by following a protocol with the body. The girls discover their powers early on by mistake, and their mother guides them. Later, one of them deliberately and against advice uses her ability for her own objective.

When Mirae drowns unexpectedly after their mother had already also died suddenly, Soojin is bereft. The loss of her sister is compounded by the loss of her mother, so that Soojin “felt wounded by everything beautiful her sister was not alive to see.” In an attempt to seem fine, Soojin makes up stories about having lots of friends for her father, whom she thinks falls for it, but does not believe her for a second.

Throughout it all, “Soojin was sovereign of the nation of never letting go.” She misses her sister too much to see clearly. Her subsequent actions illustrate what her friend Mark Moon’s mother says: “Not letting go is the only prerequisite of a haunting. Our harms never leave us if we don’t let them leave.”

So Soojin does not stop to question whether she should when she has the chance to bring Mirae back to life. The small physical remnant of her sister that Soojin finds quickly grows into a revenant form of Mirae. This Mirae returns with perfect skin, does not seem to bleed with real blood, and unbeknownst to Soojin, gains powers with water. All those warning signs are invisible to the ecstatic Soojin, who feels entirely thrilled to have her sister back. During a belated celebration of Mirae’s 18th birthday, the sisters are “euphoric and drunk on the fact of being alive.”

The issues start piling up and cannot be ignored, though. Mark notices first. At that same impromptu birthday party with the two sisters, he already sees cracks in the perfect front:

By any measure, it was a beautiful moment. But as Mirae thought, Mark saw her expression slide into something strange. A quick glance toward the window, longing and bitterness as she looked out. He felt doused by it, but just as quickly as it came on, it was gone. Her lovely face turned placid once more, lit gold by Edwardian lights.

Through the eyes of an omniscient narrator, we see not only Soojin’s joy but also Mirae’s anguish as she hears “the river’s endless, rushing want” and seeks revenge for the wrongs that led to her death.

Eventually, Soojin must face her choices despite the hopelessness of loss, but she cannot do so alone, especially because she is hanging on so tightly. Everyone around her is implicated, and it takes her father, Mark, and more to right the situation. When her father sets out to right things, Soojin must see, “Her selfishness had saddled him with this horrible choice that was no choice at all.”   

Yun and I had an interview right after her novel was published this month. We talked about her switch from writing poetry to fiction, the draw of horror novels, inspiration for And the River Drags Her Down, character growth, and what she is writing next.

Q: Our last interview about your poetry collection, Some Are Always Hungry, was about five years ago. How have you been? What is new?
A: Time has truly flown, and I’m grateful to be chatting with you again for Pulp! So much has happened in the interim that it’s hard to say if I’ve been good or bad. I’ve experienced a lot of sadness and anger at the state of the world, but also so much beauty. As for what is new, it feels like everything and nothing! I am a novelist now. I get to truly, fully live off my writing and travel to different cities to meet readers. But my day-to-day is much the same—same home, same daily walks and favorite coffee shops Comet Coffee in downtown, Rawaq on the west side—and I’m grateful for that consistency.  

Q: Your new book, And the River Drags Her Down, is young adult fiction. In fact, you mentioned that you were working on this novel in our previous interview. Tell us about how writing fiction contrasts poetry for you.
A: A full circle moment! Writing fiction was definitely a learning exercise for me. The biggest difference is I had to cultivate a whole new daily process and discipline to finish the novel that I did not feel like I had—perhaps to my own detriment—when I was writing poetry. I’ve gotten more technical about it, if that is the right word. I clock in at a certain time. I have this whole system with a timer—the Pomodoro method—and a strict log system in my calendar that tracks progress. I think, overall, in writing fiction I’ve become more fastidious—though it’s hard to say if that is because of the genre or simply because I’ve been on deadline pretty consistently since selling the novel.

I also have to resist the urge to revise as I go with fiction, which is something I usually always do with poems. I would quite simply never get a draft done otherwise.

Q: This new novel is not only a different genre but also a thriller. With such an unsettling cover, I stalled for a couple days before summoning my nerve to start reading—but then I was hooked! The timing of its publication is perfect for spooky season. Are you a reader and/or viewer of horror and thrillers? What do you like about the genres?
A: Yes, I absolutely love horror! Well, I love horror novels. I’m a bit queasy with visual media. But I’ve always loved horror literature for the way it negotiates with the unsolvable and forces the reader to sit in the discomfort of a constant what if. I feel like the animal part of our brain loves patterns and hates things that fall into the unknowable, and that is exactly what horror novels do. By its nature, it defies neat resolutions and pushes the boundaries of what we are willing to allow ourselves to see. I think the experience of really good horror novels mirrors that of the experience of a really good poem in that way. They share a similar ineffable nature.  

Q: You wrote a poem based on the Korean folktale and ghost story that And the River Drags Her Down is based on, and that poem appears in Some Are Always Hungry. How did you choose this Korean folktale and decide to turn it into a novel? Were you haunted by this story?
A: I think it is fair to say I was haunted by this story. I think mostly I was interested in retelling it because I was haunted by the notion that I’d failed in retelling it in my poetry collection in some way. For context, the retelling in my poetry collection was a pretty faithful retelling, though it stops in the middle of the source material and does not go on to cover the haunting or ghostly aspect of the original.

However, I do feel like if you are going to do a retelling, it should be subversive or transformative in some way. I’m not asserting my poem had nothing to say about its source material—it clearly had something it was trying to say about misogyny. But I just felt like, in retrospect, it was too faithful of a retelling to fully justify its space in the book.

With the novel, I wanted to take the source material and really mold it a little more so the sisters could assert some true agency over their tales. The younger sister, by surviving the drowning her fairytale counterpart suffered, and her older sister, by retaining a corporeal form even in death to seek her own redress.

Q: Some lines in the novel are poetic. Take page one, which describes “the watercolor blur of the aspens made livid with the wind.” What makes a good description in a novel compared to a poem?
A: In all honestly, I don’t really know if there is a difference about a good descriptor execution in a poem versus a novel. An image that works in one, I find, will usually work in the other. But in poetry, I suppose you have to think about the holistic effect since there is a little more economy of attention in a poem. Where is the image situated, will it be broken or carried all the way through to the end of a line. Things like that.

Q: Rain will never seem the same to me after reading this novel. What is it about water that can make it so ominous, and how did you harness its qualities for this book?
A: I think out of all the elements, having control over water would make you the most dangerous. For sheer destructive quality, there is so little you can do except wait out a truly bad flood, unlike fire which can be—arduously and sometimes not all that effectively—fought. But also, in a more zoomed-in way, the human body is mostly water. Harness control of water, and what can’t you do? The water ghost figure in this book uses water in various ways. She travels through it in almost a portal-esque fashion, but she also uses it to sift through the memories of her victims—the water makes her privy to everything the bodies have been witness to. It makes her, in a lot of ways, unstoppable by conventional means.

Q: On her return, the character Mirae gives in to her wants and anger. Yet, “As a child, Mirae had been unusually pulled together. Even after their mother died, she’d rarely lost control the way Soojin and her father did. But Soojin understood now that she’d been wrong. Shattering privately was no less real.” How did you go about writing the gruesome murders that Mirae conducts?
A: I was careful about the way I wrote the murders in the book because I felt like it was important to have them conducted in a way that aligned more to Mirae’s character as she was alive rather than the entity she becomes in death. Namely: violent but not brutal. Somewhat manicured in a way. Not messy. Those who will read the book will come to know that Mirae is a character that carefully curated herself to project perfection and unflappability. I wanted her violence to also reflect that part of her to show that not even dying was enough to reprogram the part of her that felt like she had to perform.

Q: One line about Soojin says that, “It amazed her a little—the way nothing impeded the forward motion of things.” The sisters have to come to terms with this truth in their own ways. What lessons would you say Soojin learns about herself in this book?
A: I think the most salient things she learns is probably that it is OK to be messy and imperfect as you mourn, but you still should attend to the people closest to you as you also attend to your own heart. Her inability to acknowledge her sister’s interior world and wounds contributed to her making the bad decisions that she does in the book, and I do think that Soojin comes to a bit of a reckoning about that.

Q: As we wrap up, I asked this in our previous interview, and am curious about the answer now that your latest book is a novel. What are you currently reading and recommending?
A: I’ve been reading a lot of horror novels lately to fill the well before I jump into revisions on book two. I recently finished Hollow by Taylor Grothe, which I loved and highly recommend for spooky season. I just started reading Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo, and though I’m not very far in, I can tell I’m going to really enjoy it. I also just picked up a poetry collection from an old classmate called In the Good Years by Laura Creste. I haven’t actually dived in yet beyond the first poem, but I remember her poems from class and have full confidence it will be excellent.

Q: I am not-so-secretly hoping for a sequel to And the River Drags Her Down. Will we see more novels and/or poetry from you next?
A: I am slated for a second book, coming out in Spring 2026, which, while not a sequel to River, is also a young adult horror! Though I haven’t been writing poetry in recent years, I am holding out hope that I’ll one day return to it! But for now, I’m having a lot of fun with horror novels. 

Martha Stuit is a former reporter and current librarian.