She has always known the rules – never resurrect anything larger than the palm of her hand, but that was before her sister died. A chilling, compulsive exploration of sisterhood, loss, and revenge. "Yun beautifully captures the haunting of family myths in this slow-burn horror. Eerie and poignant, And The River Drags Her Down will sweep readers into its relentless current." - Trang Thanh Tran, New York Times bestselling author of She Is a Haunting When her older sister is found mysteriously drowned in the river that cuts through their small coastal town, Soojin Han disregards every rule and uses her ancestral magic to bring Mirae back from the dead. At first, the sisters are overjoyed, reveling in late-night escapades and the miracle of being together again, but Mirae grows tired of hiding from the world. She becomes restless and hungry . . . Driven by an insatiable desire to finish what she started in life, to unravel the truth that crushed her family so many years ago, Mirae is out for revenge. When their town is engulfed by increasingly destructive rain and a series of harrowing, unusual deaths, Soojin is forced to reckon with the fact that perhaps the sister she brought back isn’t the one she knew.

Autorentext
Jihyun Yun is a Korean American writer from the San Francisco Bay Area who now resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She is the author of Some Are Always Hungry, a Prairie Schooner Prize winning poetry collection. A recipient of various fellowships and grants, she received her BA in Psychology from UC Davis and an MFA in poetry from New York University. And The River Drags Her Down is her debut novel.

Klappentext

"A girl must deal with the consequences of resurrecting her sister"--

Leseprobe
1.

Despite her best efforts, the rat was dead.

Soojin knew it by the way Milkis didn’t leap toward the cage door the moment she entered the room. Normally, the sound of her pawing the newspaper shavings or scuttling down the ramps was an omnipresent music. But this evening there was only perfect, unwelcome silence.

She found Milkis in one of the hammocks hanging from the top tier of the cage, body curled like an apostrophe. She had not been dead long. Rigor mortis hadn’t set in yet, and her pink nose was still damp to the touch. At least she had died painlessly, unlike last time, when her mammary tumors grew as large as almonds from her underbelly.

Soojin pulled the rat into her palm. Milkis was not a beautiful animal: unusually large for her species, with white fur grown patchy from skin conditions, eyes wet and protruding like pomegranate seeds. But she was cherished, and would be back soon.

After donning latex gloves, Soojin laid the rat on a lined plastic tray and cut the tail off with a dissection scalpel swiped from biology class. It yielded beneath the blade easier than expected. A small, wet snap, not so different from cutting through the spine of a cutlassfish. Then she was transferring the severed length to a ziplock bag. This was what she would use to call Milkis back. The rest of the body must not be returned to the ground.

Though they had not had a chance to get large, the growths were in the rat’s belly again, waiting to turn malignant. Burying a sick body revived the ailments. Best to work with a healthy cut or from scratch, which is to say bone. But the tail was im-maculate. It would work well.

Soojin swaddled the body in tissue and placed it into a shoebox for the pet ceme-tery’s hearth. The blood where it was severed spread crimson ringlets through the white, and she swallowed hard against the familiar sickness rising in her throat. The crude surgery finished, she held her quivering hands together, digging her nails into the wrist of her scalpel hand, waiting for the sharp pain to steady her.

At only seventeen, Soojin Han was no stranger to death. She had seen Milkis expire and rise countless times, but this would be her first time resurrecting anything alone. Her sister, Mirae, though only a year older, had been the bold one who could calmly stomach anything and so had always taken the bloodier tasks upon herself. Close your eyes, Mirae would say, and by the time Soojin opened them again, the grim division would be done. The healthiest body part neatly excised from the rest, ready to be fed to earth and fire, respectively.

Last fall, Mirae drowned in Black Pine River, which wended its way through their small town and beyond it. Soojin still glimpsed her sister everywhere: Mirae at the sink, humming as she rinsed suds off dishes. Mirae in the golden-hour light, brush-ing her hair by the window, screen popped out, feeding strands to the wind. Mirae, named after the Korean word for future, which she would never possess. The in-tervening ten months between her death and now had mitigated nothing. Soojin still felt picked at by grief’s carrion birds.

A tap on the wall startled her. Her father stood by the door, eyeing her warily.

“Knock-knock,” he said, aiming for levity and missing. How anyone could make knock-knock sound like a grave missive, Soojin would never know. He cleared his throat but did not cross the threshold, opting instead to lean on the doorframe, arms folded across his chest. His awkward body language irritated her.

It hadn’t always been this way. Just a year ago, Soojin, Mirae, and their father would lounge in front of the TV, laughing at game shows. They would cajole him into midnight drives to the gas station for shitty taquitos and Coke slushies. Their small family unit had felt tight and impenetrable. But after Mirae’s death, every-thing changed.

“Leaving tonight?” Soojin asked. Her father’s face was gaunt, darkened with une-ven patches of stubble like dapples on a horsehide.

“Yeah.” He nodded. “The house is stocked up. If you need anything, call. I’ll be home every weekend.”

Their home was in Jade Acre, a tiny resort town afflicted with too much beauty, nestled between miles of woods and towering bluffs, the sea such an uncanny shade of blue it was like diving into the iris of an eye. The summers were long and sultry and asphyxiated with tourists brandishing money like green artillery.

For a few months, all was generous: the fruit-bearing trees, the nesting birds, the shallow bays where tourists paid heftily to dive by day for three endangered red abalones and illegally snuck in by night for more. But in the off months, the town became dreary and isolated, taxed by rain that beat the landscape into mulch. A waterlogged softness grew into everything, and the townsfolk rarely left.

Father was one of the rare leavers. Every year, once the tourist months ended, along with the modest stream of income from the family’s bed-and-breakfast, Fa-ther packed his bags and drove three hours east to the city of Bragg Hills to work for his cousin’s construction company. The long commute too difficult to manage, their father stayed with his cousin during the week and made his way back to Jade Acre on the weekends.

It wasn’t ideal. You either made enough during tourist months or spent the rest of the year scraping. When Soojin’s mother was alive, she had wanted to leave Jade Acre for that reason. Han’s Bed & Breakfast was unsustainable. Every year they put away a little less. But Father had dug in his heels.

How can we sell the house our girls grew up in? Wasn’t this our dream?

When Mother died seven years ago in a car wreck, the possibility of leaving died with her. No one wanted to leave the home where the memories of Mother still lived, and now of Mirae, too. Soojin felt them lingering everywhere in the house. Her loves, curled in the window alcove and inside each doorframe like endless questions.

“Will you be okay, Soo?” her…