It's the perfect plan: they'll kidnap the up-and-coming idol singer, keep him sedated in a far off mansion, and have him all to themselves.Holy Boy is the story of four disturbed fans and their harebrained, horrific plan to preserve their oshi forever. But what was the tipping point that turned these four from fervent fans into captors? And will anyone be able to track them down and bring them to justice? Find out what happens when fangirling over an idol turns into something dark and destructive.

Holy Boy is translated by Joheun Lee.

It's the perfect plan: they'll kidnap the up-and-coming idol singer, keep him sedated in a far off mansion, and have him all to themselves.Holy Boy is the story of four disturbed fans and their harebrained, horrific plan to preserve their oshi forever. But what was the tipping point that turned these four from fervent fans into captors? And will anyone be able to track them down and bring them to justice? Find out what happens when fangirling over an idol turns into something dark and destructive.

Holy Boy is translated by Joheun Lee.

You don't need to look very far into real life events to see how idol singers bring out the worst in a select few of their fans. Last year, South Korean prosecutors indicted a Japanese woman forallegedly forcibly kissing Jin of BTS. In 2026, a female stalker wasarrested for the third time in January 2026 for stalking Jungkook, also of BTS. A masked womanpulled singer Jackson Wang out of his car. For most people, idol fandom is a fun and lighthearted pastime, but for a fraction, this interest can spin into psychosis. How does our adulation of celebrities turn dark, and why? Is it a faulty quirk of the human condition, or is there something we can do about it?

These are the questions that Heejoo Lee explores inHoly Boy, a lurid and all-too-timely tale of four twisted women who kidnap their beloved idol performer. This provocative work about obsession, madness, and the dark side of love melds the traditional Gothic horror plot with a thriller featuring neurotic modern-day fans. The result is an unputdownable novel about what drives people to desperation: a character study about how a shared adoration awakens the darkest impulses in four women of varying ages and social standings, from all walks of life. Lee is a literature graduate and it shows: her work references everything fromOscar Wilde to Buddhist parables—and of course, Steven King'sMisery, the most famous story of an obsessive fan kidnapping her idol that there is.Holy Boy is prestige writing: disturbing, detailed, gorgeously written in contrast to its gruesome content, and a profoundly transformative story that I will be thinking about for years to come. Though it was initially self-published on a serialization website as many light novels are, it's as far from “light” as you can get.

We are introduced to him only as “the boy.” He is deeply confused and completely incapacitated after an accident he can't recall. He's so lucky that four kindly women have taken him to convalesce at their remote mansion… or is he? Is somebody sneaking into his room at night to watch him, or is it only a nightmare? And most importantly, who is he and why can't heremember? I found reading the boy's story to be psychically damaging; it doesn't skimp on a single grisly detail of his care. (Or is it torture?) The details are unflinching even when I wish they would flinch a little bit; the very first scene the boy awakens to is of having soiled himself. As this tense, descriptive writing gradually teases out increasingly distressing details of the boy's predicament, the story transitions from a general feeling of wrongness to alarm bells as we mentally scream at him to get out of there right now. It's a fascinating reversal of the “final girl” trope in horror because this male idol is in no less danger from his female captors than if the sexes were reversed. What's more, the genderswap blends and confuses the women's nurturing care and their sinister, and at times murderous, intentions.

But the story really blossoms after it expands beyond the boy's claustrophobic predicament. The wheels of the women's plan have been in motion for a long time—and it never would have worked if the boy had not been failed by many, many people throughout his brief, gilded idol career: from his pedophile talent manager to his envious, miserable bodyguards, to even thecircumstances of his birth (sexual assault of his mother, of course). As Lee meticulously unspools every traumatic detail of the boy's life and skyrocketing fame, she exposes the many ways the idol industry fails its idols, but her tone is never “I told you so.” It's more like reading a tabloid magazine: just line after line of increasingly shocking reveals. All of this is couched in Lee's (and translator Joheun Lee's) poetic writing. Instead of cushioning the blow, this wordsmithery makes the circumstances of the story feel even more twisted. It isn't until I reach the end of an elegantly constructed sentence that I realize that I've been punched in the gut. Take this description of the boy: “His smooth cheeks were the weathered result of countless caresses from women's gazes.” Or this sketch of the gloomy off-season beach town: “A black pine forest. Waves licking the cliff. The foam shattered to reveal sharp, white teeth, but they couldn't scathe the rocks even one bit.” Or the moment one of the women gives in to temptation: “Like a knife slitting open a fish, her hand slid from his chest down to below his belly button.” It's incredible how much beauty there is in this book full of the ugliest human impulses imaginable.

Aside from the tense, masterful suspense scenes that take place in the mansion, Lee excels at her character studies, which follow the women from birth to the present, along with all of the people and things that have shaped them into the tormented souls they are today. Each of the women who take part in the idol kidnapping scheme has a dark past that has led her perfectly up to this point. Young and old, rich and poor, they are not so different; what they all share beside their idol worship is a watershed trauma that brought out their inner darkness and made them feel like they had nothing to lose. Lee does not blink when she describes these women, warts and all, reveling in the disgusting details of their mortal bodies (think chewing, drooling, and vomiting) to serve as a window to the rot within. Every character, no matter how minor, from the bodyguard who encourages the boy to orchestrate his own downfall, to the naive young police officer who is delighted when the women invite her into the mansion, has a fully explored backstory that makes him or her interesting, if not usually sympathetic. These real-feeling characters keep the story rooted even when things start to go off the rails and the reader is left to decide whose interpretation of events is the truth of the matter.

I can already tellHoly Boy is one of those titles that is going to stay with me for a long time. When I first began reading it, I realized I'd need to close the covers or else I'd be up all night following its characters into the most unsettling recesses of their distorted minds. The writing is a cut above the usual cut-and-dry light novel prose, to put it mildly, and its literary references had me reading with English Major Mode fully engaged.Holy Boy is already a hit in South Korea and I believe it has the potential to be a cult hit, if not a full-on bestseller, in English, too. At its height, this prose is something beautiful. But because its content is so disturbing, including content warnings for pedophilia, rape, murder, body horror, and even just everyday bodily grossness, readers should approach it like the heavy psychological horror tale that it is.