of time when viewed today, it remains an impressive work. It's particularly fascinating when viewed from the perspective of the posthuman, a concept that doesn't necessarily require the label “human”, as seen in Cyborg, techno-organism, Discorporates, and Linguistic Metamorphosis—the fluid and transformative human body and soul.

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Octavia Butler's works are deeply fascinating. Just as Mary Shelley, by showing her Frankenstein's monster, foresaw the imminent death of humanity and the possibility of transhumans or posthumans, physically and intellectually superior to humans, soon after the birth of humanity (in the modern sense), Octavia Butler envisions a posthuman existence, a fusion of heterogeneous species, on a cosmic scale. In particular, through the stories of surviving humans, Lilith Iyapo, and the Oankali, she captivatingly illustrates the death of one species, including humanity, and their fusion with the alien, qualitative leaps (evolution through gene trade), and the path to biological, psychological, social, and cultural fusion and coexistence among others. While her groundbreaking insights sometimes provoke a sense of repulsion or psychological disorientation, akin to David Cronenberg's body horror, they never induce anxiety or sadness, because they focus on humanity's new vitality and adaptability on a cosmic scale rather than its existential dread, and on the search for fateful and inevitable fusion and coexistence among others. (As Michel Foucault said, the death of a human being is not necessarily something that causes tears.) This is reminiscent of Bruno Latour's ecological field, a field of ontological hybridity, or Donna J. Haraway's "Make Kin Not Babies!" It contemplates a new form of relationship that goes beyond biological kinship-centrism, and a symbiotic relationship with multispecies on a cosmic scale. Just as the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes went beyond the Earth, contemplating nature from a cosmic perspective.

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When I think of Philip K. Dick, the first work that comes to mind is the short story “Impostor”. This work poses the fundamental question, “What is a human?” by depicting the struggle of a robot(bomb android) which mistakes itself for a human, revealing its true (or false)  identity to the federal intelligence agent pursuing it. Michel Foucault argued that the three axes of life, labor, and language—the core of the modern knowledge system—formed a human-centered anthropology(biology, economics, and linguistics), giving rise to the discursive construct of the human. However, this modern arrangement has long been dismantled. Humans are attempting to overcome their organic limitations through the use of artificial organs and prosthetics, automation and robots are assisting or replacing human labor, and language, as seen in computer language and AI, is no longer a human monopoly. We may no longer be able to prove ourselves human. Or perhaps we will be the last humans.

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14H: Have you written other vampire stories? Do you read them often? I must confess I haven’t read many but I have watched Buffy and the new (and old) Interview with the Vampire… and your vampires feel very different - in many ways blood feels like a grocery item in your story, and it’s about getting back to the Attic lover. Where did the boyfriend character come from for you? How did that inspiration of the tunnel-hole from your old neighborhood turn into a vampire story like this?

 

JKL: I've read classics like Dracula by Bram Stoker, Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, The Vampyre by John Polidori, Clarimonde by Théophile Gautier, and more modern vampire novels like Salem's Lot by Stephen King, Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice, Fevre Dream by George R.R. Martin, Fledgling by Octavia Butler, I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas, The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers, and Already Dead by Charlie Huston, but I don't have a particular preference for vampire novels.

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Looking back, I was writing a vampire novel about 20 years ago. It's about a poor vampire translator living in that very house in "The Attic", at a time when a far-right government is in power in Korea. He would go out to anti-government protests at night and one day he became entangled in the turbulent political events of the time. I had written the piece up to novella length, but the pressure of my job as a translator forced me to stop writing it. I plan to finish it someday.          

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After graduating from university, I worked nights for about three years and lived in a tiny room with no sunlight during the day. The books were piled so high up on both sides, all the way to the ceiling, that lying down in the space between them felt like lying in a coffin. Back then, I thought of myself as a vampire. Since I was practically a vegetarian at the time, I imagined myself as a vampire sucking plant juices, like vampires in Remedios Varo's painting Vegetarian Vampires. Perhaps that's why I naturally wrote a vampire fiction. In that sense, all of the fiction and poetry I've written so far, no matter how fantastical, are semi-autobiographical. Then, the boyfriend character is a reflection of myself. In fact, “The Attic” was written while I was contemplating my life experiences from the perspective of a mathematical (or sociological) ‘translation’*. My moving from the countryside to Susaek (Watercolor) in Seoul, and then from Susaek to Yeomni-dong (Saltdong)—these were parallel displacements. I felt my life remained fundamentally unchanged, regardless of the spatial and temporal shift. And it's clear that the tunnel-hole in Susaek, a material embodiment of the uncanny, and the attic of my childhood in the countryside provided inspiration for me.

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When I walked through that dark, elongated hole, with its flickering incandescent lights here and there, I felt as though something ominous were about to happen. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, my eyes kept wandering towards it. Each time, I felt compelled to write something using that hole as a backdrop, or even as the protagonist. That's why this hole plays a key role in the early part of the aforementioned vampire novel. It is there that I am bitten by a dying, old vampire, and I meet my lover (the vampire's daughter) as well as the first Korean vampire who arrived in Korea from 18th-century England.

When I moved to Seoul, the attic in the shabby house in the Daldongne (Moon neighborhood) of the big city, no different from the poor countryside village in some ways despite the difference in environment, offered solace, just like the attic of a country house. It was the only place that could relieve the feeling of dissatisfaction of “You come to someplace new and everything looks the same” (Stranger than Paradise). As a child, it was a place I enjoyed reading alone, and I even found treasures among the piles of junk on one side. Nothing special, really. When I opened the window in my friend's attic, I could see persimmon leaves falling from the trees, cows trampling over them, and the beautiful mountain landscape unfolding before me. At night, stars poured down. Even if the window was closed, even if it was a confined space, it was like a window offering a glimpse into another world. Like the window that occasionally opens in Kafka's closed world, allowing a view outside - as Milan Kundera described it. In that sense, the image of the attic with its colorful soul is both familiar and fresh. It can be uncanny when it's both familiar and unfamiliar.

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I still can only write my own story. So, even if the stories I write are fantasy, half of them are my own story.

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The neighborhood where the two beings in “The Attic” lived has now completely disappeared. As Walter Benjamin said, “To live is to leave traces”. Are there really traces of life left in the places where the two vanished beings once lived? Or even the soul of the place? Traces are important to me. In “The Attic”, the vampire could be a kind of MacGuffin, but I wanted it to remain as a trace that would never disappear, creating a subtle atmosphere like that of the attic, a space that could be considered a man's existential landscape.

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You mentioned that the blood felt like a grocery item. That's a fresh perspective. I didn't write it with that intention. I just wanted to avoid depicting the specific act of obtaining blood itself, in the same way that the film No Country For Old Men deliberately avoids showing Anton Chigurh killing Llewelyn Moss. I think that's what created that particular mood and feeling.

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* French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu used the mathematical term ‘translation’ to imply that classes would still be reproduced even if your positions or locations shift.

 

14H: I read about your experience of this tunnel when you lived in Sueseok that was next to Sueseok Station – how you always felt like you were going to get bitten there, and the tunnel “seemed to squirm” after you exited… but this was 30 years ago! And you’re not sure if the place still exists. That’s the part that, for me, is found in your story. Is this a particular question of uncanny places that may or may not still exist one you write into often?

 

JKL: I lived in the countryside until I moved to Seoul for university. When I was very young, my hometown didn't have electricity or running water. There was a communal well about 40 meters from my house. On clear nights, the moon would rise and often tremble in the well. The stars would rise too. As early as the 12th century, the Korean historian Kim Busik wrote in the Samguk Sagim, a medieval Korean history book about ancient Korea, that “a white rainbow was lodged in the palace well.” Thus, the history of wells and the lives surrounding them is profound. Eventually, when our village gained electricity, running water and modern housing, our village well was covered with a large cement lid and buried in the ground. Perhaps there's still an intact well underground today. This well story appears in my essay and poem. I don't write consciously, but I seem to be drawn to uncanny places. Another example is the déjà vu I experienced in a childhood dream that I wrote about in the essay—I still remember it vividly. In that peculiar dream, I was playing in the front yard of a thatched cottage with a bush clover fence, perched on a semicircular protrusion halfway up a seaside cliff. The place felt both familiar and unfamiliar, yet incredibly beautiful, and I felt as though I'd played there before. Looking up, I felt I was seeing clouds I had seen before — or rather, clouds that my distant ancestors had seen long ago. Even after waking from the dream, that feeling lingered stubbornly. The short story or novella I'm currently envisaging is set against the backdrop of the Knives Rock on Mt. Bukhan in Seoul, a place I would often climb. I'm considering a modern reimagining of the Macbeth story. If so, that familiar place would surely become uncanny.

 

14H: How does music feed your work? Do particular lines from songs get stuck in your head and you go from there or is it a mix of the mood of a song and then it takes you somewhere in your writing? Especially the two songs you have on your blog for “The Attic,”Arcade Fire’s “In the Attic” and Radiohead’s “True Love Waits” – aside from the titles the songs themselves put me in a certain place that clicked into the story after reading. These long rhythmic beats that drive the pace of the songs in such a slow yet energetic way really comes across in your story as well.

 

JKL: Music, like books (novels, poetry, humanities), is an important part of my life. I always listen to music while writing or translating books. I'm listening to music right now. I used to enjoy songs by Arcade Fire and Radiohead too. But actually, I'd forgotten about those two songs when I was writing “The Attic”. Yet they suddenly came to mind while I was writing in my blog. And as I listened carefully, I realized they fit my "Attic" perfectly. As you mentioned, the rhythm, tempo, and specific lyrics seemed to fit the flow of my story. I think those songs have become ingrained in me. In this way, music has profoundly influenced my life and writing. Without music, I wouldn't have been able to endure my difficult and boring life.

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Let me tell you an anecdote: as a huge Bob Dylan fan, I've been predicting to acquaintances for over 30 years that he would win the Nobel Prize in Literature. When he actually won, several people called me to say how surprised they were that my prediction had come true. This anecdote appears in my short story, “Submerging into the Half-Asleep State”. The story was inspired by an experience I had while looking at Escher's painting “Three Worlds”, which reminded me of André Breton's Soluble Fish, and another experience I had while dozing off to Led Zeppelin's “The Rover”. Without those experiences, I could never have written it.

 

14H: What is your relationship as a writer with uncanny? How has this genre shown up in your other work (poetry, stories…)? Are there particular places you would like to take your uncanny real-life experiences, or do you wait for them to present themselves to you? How would you define the “uncanny” genre?

 

JKL: As I mentioned earlier, all the stories and poems I've written are semi-autobiographical tales based on my own experiences. I don't deliberately seek out uncanny subjects or attempt to write in that manner. If my stories have uncanny elements or if the uncanny forms the core of my stories, it seems like a natural outcome emerging from my lived experiences.

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Freud argued that the familiar, once repressed and hidden, returns to evoke the uncanny (unheimlich)—a terrifying unfamiliar. Zombies, in that the most familiar of all, family (father, mother, daughter or son), friends, or neighbors, suddenly transform into the most repulsive and terrifying beings, living corpses, attacking “me”, are the most extreme form of the uncanny. Stephen King is perhaps arguably the master of this genre. However, this uncanny phenomenon, where the familiar becomes unfamiliar, is not limited to literature or film, but can be experienced by anyone in everyday life. 

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Let me give you an example: after illegal martial law was imposed in Korea on 3 December 2024, I attended anti-government rallies in the plaza every weekend, demanding the overthrow of the government that trampled on the Constitution and the impeachment of the president. Yet, when I returned home and turned on the TV, a completely different world – a world of entertainment and reality shows – unfolded as if nothing had happened. Even though a self-coup had occurred by the corrupt regime, the world created by reality entertainment was a utopia. The contrast between the plaza and the world on TV was truly uncanny. 

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It's ironic that they use the word ‘reality’ for entertainment that doesn't reflect reality at all. The phenomenon of reality being closer to fiction than fiction itself is the most uncanny aspect of the present day. If you suddenly feel lonelier when you’re with your family than when you’re alone, that would be an uncanny experience. In that sense, if we consider the uncanny as a genre, it seems to be about contemplating the familiar and creating narratives and stories from the perspective of the unfamiliar. As Theodor W. Adorno said, perhaps unfamiliarity is the only antidote to alienation.

 

14H: In your poem “The Fall of Snakes” your speaker finds the universe in the symbol of the snake eating its own tail, but then the speaker is horrified by the killing of actual snakes around the house and the neighborhood, only to attempt to find solace in the eating of chicken which has eaten maggots from the bodies of these snakes… is this another uncanny experience from life that has informed your writing? If you feel comfortable, where did this poem come from?

 

JKL: That poem stems from my own experiences and the stories I heard in the countryside as a child. The incident in the poem where the speaker's grandfather catches a snake and hangs it from a persimmon tree branch is almost my only memory of my own grandfather. Ultimately, the poem is a work that grew from the gap between memory and fact.

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Among my childhood friends, there was one who actually liked snake meat. And while it was a very rare case back then, it was said there were people who ate chickens that had eaten maggots from the bodies of these snakes. Chickens that had grown up eating snake maggots(so-called snake chickens) were said to lose their feathers. They were eaten as a special health food. This snake chicken culture has disappeared now. It's just a legend. Even catching snakes is illegal these days.

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I've always been afraid of snakes, yet I also feel affection for them. It's because they feel, like, both creepy and mysterious. I can't act carelessly towards beings with faces, whether human or animal. Emmanuel Levinas recognized the face as the ethical presence of the Other, but hesitated to answer Jacques Derrida's question about whether animals have faces. However, I can answer that question clearly. In my experience, even snakes have faces. In his poem ‘The Snake’, D. H. Lawrence wrote that “He(the snake) lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do, And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do....” It wouldn't be strange to replace the cattle with a human here.