In Angel Town, a small Midwestern community built around its church and surrounded by endless cornfields, life appears peaceful on the surface. In 1979, the town’s largest and most expensive mansion becomes home to a Korean family—a wealthy couple running a vast farm and their son, Han. They conceal the townspeople’s hostility toward Asians with their wealth and influence, establishing themselves as local elites. That same year, another Korean family moves into the dilapidated house that shares the mansion’s yard. Jeong, Hee, and their son Jun, with their broken English and pungent smell of garlic, become targets of mockery and discrimination. The hatred the townspeople cannot direct at Han’s family is instead unleashed upon Jun’s. After Jun’s arrival, strange phenomena begin to haunt Han. He finds himself unwillingly seeing and feeling the world through Jun’s eyes. Eventually, Han learns that this is a form of spiritual possession, and that Jun’s family has long been shamans in Korea. Bound by a strict contract, the two boys trade harm and hurt, forging a bizarre friendship while swearing to escape the hell of Angel Town together. Time passes. Seoul, 1999. Han now stands with Min-kyung at the altar, taking step after step to the wedding march—unaware of where those steps will ultimately lead…

The moment we see the world through another’s senses, we awaken to the violence contained in the word “us.” Set in a small Midwestern town in 1979, the story follows two Korean boys—each from different classes and circumstances—whose strange connection exposes the history of hatred and the violence within community bonds. The author sheds light on the hatred and violence of majority cultures toward minority ones, proving that literature is, in the end, a rite that summons forgotten histories into the present. At the same time, with its overwhelming narrative and shocking twists, it offers readers a profound novelistic catharsis.