While reading And The River Drags Her Down, I couldn’t help but think of Jason Isbell’s song The River. The final chorus captures how I felt about this powerful novel.

The river is my saviour
She’s running to the sea
And to reach her destination
Is to simply cease to be
And running ’til you’re nothing
Sounds a lot like being free
So I’ll lay myself inside her
And I’ll let her carry me

And the River Drags Her Down by Jihyun Yun: A Hauntingly Beautiful Tale of Grief and Sisterhood

: A Hauntingly Beautiful Tale of Grief and Sisterhood

In the crowded landscape of young adult supernatural fiction, “And the River Drags Her Down”  is a debut novel that balances beauty with raw, unsettling horror. Jihyun Yun, an accomplished poet, turns her lyrical talents to the young adult genre with remarkable success.

At its heart, “And the River Drags Her Down” follows seventeen-year-old Soojin Han, who possesses a secret family gift: the ability to reanimate the dead. Passed down through generations of women in her family, this power comes with one sacred rule:

never resurrect anything larger than the palm of her hand.

For years, Soojin and her sister Mirae have honoured this rule, content with reviving the occasional dead rodent or their family pet rat. But when Mirae is found mysteriously drowned in the Black Pine River that cuts through their small coastal town, Soojin’s world collapses.

Blinded by grief and the weight of becoming the eldest daughter after already losing their mother years before, Soojin makes a fateful decision: she breaks the ancestral rule and brings Mirae back. The initial joy of reunion quickly sours as Soojin realises the sister who returned is not the one she knew and loved. The town soon finds itself engulfed in relentless rain and a series of harrowing, unusual deaths, forcing Soojin to confront the terrifying truth her mother warned her about, sometimes the dead don’t stay who they were. Some boundaries were never meant to be crossed.

What sets Yun’s novel apart from other “came back wrong” narratives is its raw exploration of grief. This is not merely a supernatural thriller but a study of loss and the lengths to which love can distort into something dangerous.

And the River Drags Her Down explores how grief manifests differently in its characters. Soojin’s father drowns in his sorrow, creating emotional distance from his surviving daughter. Soojin herself turns to forbidden magic in a desperate attempt to reassemble the fragments of her shattered family. Even Mirae, in her resurrected form, carries her own grief, for the life cut short, for the truths left uncovered, for the maternal role thrust upon her after their mother’s death years earlier. This layered approach to mourning gives the story an emotional depth.

Yun seamlessly weaves Korean folklore and cultural elements throughout the narrative, creating a fresh take on the supernatural genre that stands apart from Western-centric horror traditions. The magic system itself, rooted in matrilineal inheritance, feels both ancient and authentic, with origins explained through family history about an ancestor who originally developed the ability during a prolonged famine to repeatedly resurrect a chicken for food.

The incorporation of Korean water spirits and ghosts adds an extra layer of eeriness to the atmosphere. Beyond the supernatural elements, the novel is grounded in authentic family dynamics, traditions, and the experience of navigating between cultures in a small, predominantly white coastal town.

As expected from a poet, Yun’s prose walks the delicate line between brutal and beautiful, creating a deeply atmospheric reading experience.

This atmospheric quality enhances the horror elements, as dread accumulates gradually, like rising floodwaters, until the reader is completely submerged in the story’s unsettling world.

While the supernatural elements provide the plot’s engine, the richly drawn characters form the heart of Yun’s novel. Soojin emerges as a flawed protagonist, desperate, lonely, and willing to risk everything to avoid further loss. Her bad decisions stem from relatable pain, making her sympathetic even when the reader recognises the danger of her choices.

Yun’s portrayal of Mirae’s treatment could have easily turned into a flat, one-dimensional villain if handled by less talented writers. We come to understand that she is shaped by her own unique pain, personal history, and deeply rooted motivations, which add layers of depth and nuance to her role in the story.

“And the River Drags Her Down” is an extraordinary debut. It succeeds on multiple levels, as a creepy supernatural tale, as a powerful family drama, and as a profound meditation on grief that refuses to offer easy answers.

Let this haunting, heart-wrenching tale of sisterhood drag you into its relentless current, you won’t want to come up for air.

And the River Drags Her Down by Jihyun Yun

Soojin has always known the rules – never bring back anything larger than her palm from the dead, but that was before Mirae died.

‘Eerie and poignant.’ Trang Thanh Tran, author of She is a Haunting

Sister, I hear you. I feel your hands in the dirt, beckoning. I will answer your call – I’ll return.

When her older sister is found drowned in the river that cuts through their small, sleepy town, Soojin is beside herself with grief. Disregarding every rule, she uses her ancestral magic to bring Mirae back from the dead. At first, the sisters delight in their reunion, but Mirae soon grows tired of hiding from the world. She becomes restless and hungry…

As the town is rocked by a series of harrowing, unusual deaths, Soojin fears the sister she brought back to life isn’t the one she knew.

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