The Ghosts of Daehak-ro
대학로 귀신들
Daehangno Gwisindeul
Who was changing the lines backstage? A former actor's witness statement to a detective opens onto a much larger performance, staged in investors' boardrooms, an election campaign and an online opinion war.
Synopsis
The novel opens in a police station, where Seo Dong-gyu is giving a witness statement to a detective. What starts out sounding like a personal memoir keeps widening.
Dong-gyu was drawn into the world of a small theater company in Daehak-ro, Seoul's theater district, still reeling from the pandemic. The closer he gets to its actors, the further he is pulled into a vast performance staged in the real world: the startup and investment scene, the planning and image-making of an election campaign, and the intricate machinery of online opinion manipulation.
The “ghosts of Daehak-ro” are not phantoms. They are actors who have lost their roles on stage and been handed new ones on the stage of reality. Structured in two acts, the novel rises and falls like a curtain, and to the very end the reader is left doubting what is theater and what is real.
Why it works on screen
- A police interview room: a former actor begins a witness statement to a detective. The whole story is that statement, which keeps the audience in the juror's seat to the end, deciding whom to believe.
- Midday drinks over frozen pork belly in Daehak-ro; forty-year-old Ballantine's in a Gangnam penthouse at night. Actors who lost their stage to the pandemic move between the two worlds.
- Their new roles: startup investor pitches, image-making for an election campaign, an online troll farm. Stage acting turns, quite literally, into a technique of power.
- Built like a play, with a prologue and two acts, and chapter titles (Statement, No Retakes, Audition, Method, VC, Backstage) that read like an episode list. The author calls it an eyewitness account of the ghost-like fixers he saw around powerful men in business and politics.
Praise
“A theatrical thriller where daytime drinks over frozen pork belly in Daehak-ro cross paths with forty-year-old Ballantine's in a Gangnam penthouse.”
“A good actor makes you believe the role. A frightening actor makes you doubt reality itself. This novel does exactly that.”