Petty Lies

by Sulmi Bak

Genres: Epistolary Fiction; Horror

Synopsis

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN meets THE VEGETARIAN in this chilly and chilling epistolary novel of four characters locked in a frightening cycle of vengeance and comeuppance.

Mira is a desperate young woman, hired by a wealthy single mother to tutor her lonesome son, Yuchan. But Mira is not who she presents herself to be; she is haunted by the death of her own family and motivated by the dark pulse of vengeance. Yuchan was cruel to Mira’s mother. A kind of cruelty she can’t ever forgive.
 
And then there is Jiwon, the boy’s mother, a bad mother, Mira thinks—or so Jiwon tells herself she must not be.
 
But as Mira spends more time in the family’s sprawling home, she begins to suspect Yuchan is not the culprit she’s after. Someone else in the family has been pulling the strings. Someone with a deviant plan she can’t begin to imagine.
 
Structured around four different letters and journal entries: Mira's, Jiwon's reply, Yuchan's younger brother's diary entry and, finally, Mira's own written recollection. Each new section brings us deeper into a web of cruelty, consequence, and closer to the truth.

Release date: November 11, 2025

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 160

Sample

Hello, Yujae’s mother.

I expect you’re wondering why I’ve suddenly written you a letter. Before I give my reasons, I’d like you to know that four-fifths of this letter had already been written by the time I started tutoring your son.

You may need to pay attention from now on as you read my letter, as I’m about to discuss events that happened one year ago.

Yes, I know.

Why now bring up the far-distant past? you’re thinking. But since those events matter more to me than anything else, so much so that I remember them as clearly as if they happened yesterday, I hope you’ll read this letter to the end.

Do you remember the incident last year, when the mutilated body of a dog, a black dachshund, was discovered in front of the public restroom in the park?

From now on, I’ll call the dog “Bell.”

A year ago, a barely five-year-old Bell slipped out through the front door, which his owner had propped open to let in some fresh air, and was wandering about in the streets. I assume you know about the territorial nature of dogs. Unlike cats, who attempt to defend their domain, dogs have a strong instinct to widen theirs. It’s for this reason that they urinate on roadside trees and utility poles. And more so than any other animal, dogs have an irrepressible curiosity. Surely, it’s only natural that an animal like that would want to know what the world outside looked like and whether they might find new friends.

After leaving the house, Bell scampered off without a backward glance. In his excitement, he’d even have forgotten to mark his territory against every utility pole in sight. Much later, a thought would have struck him: My mother will be looking for me—have I traveled too far from home? And then the dog would have grown more and more frightened.

What’s your take on this, Ms. Moon? Suppose your child has lost his way. Imagine that your child, scarcely five years of age, is wandering about in the streets. In the space of an instant, wouldn’t his curiosity about that unfamiliar world transform into fear? It might happen to anyone, not just children. Left stranded in a strange place, adults are just as likely to go mad with terror—and in some extreme cases, even to the point of harming themselves.

And yet, perhaps because dogs are such loyal creatures, Bell would have known his owner would be upset if anything awful were to happen to him, and he’d have tried to find a way back home by any means possible.

But that night, Bell was discovered as a corpse. His cervical vertebrae had been completely shattered.

Did you know that the bones of the neck are not easily broken?

Attached directly to the rest of the spine, the cervical vertebrae are closely linked to one’s rate of survival, which means they’re one of the most intricate and vital parts of the body. That’s why they don’t easily fracture, as a rule. But the same bones will also splinter like wooden chopsticks if someone twisted them with all the force in their arms. Even if you were lucky enough to survive such an attack, you’d end up becoming disabled.

Did Bell not have even that little bit of luck?

Since the cervical vertebrae won’t fracture unless brute force is applied, fractured cervical vertebrae can mean only one thing. That’s murder. Without one last embrace from his owner, the poor dog had been murdered near his home.

How on earth had things come to this point?

Whose fault was it? Bell’s for having run outside, unable to suppress his instincts? Or was it his owner’s for failing to be more attentive? You might say both were at fault.

But everyone’s bound to make a mistake. Every living creature makes mistakes. Even monkeys sometimes fall out of trees.

The worst kind of act isn’t done out of ignorance; it’s an act that is committed knowingly.

You should never turn a blind eye to a willful act. Yet what are things like in reality? The courts permit sexual offenders with recidivism rates of up to 100 percent to reenter society; schools keep quiet to cover up bullying incidents; and cases of animal cruelty are ruled simple negligence. That’s because society is always on the side of the powerful. It is society that favors adults over children, men over women, the wealthy over the poor, humans over animals, and the able-bodied over disabled persons.

Do you know about the Somang incident, by any chance?

On the eighteenth of August in 2011, two assailants stoned a suspected three-year-old dog on a construction site in the middle of the public square of Gwanghwamun. For forty minutes they threw rocks at the dog, which they’d cornered beside a container, because they thought it was barking too loudly. For that reason alone, they’d tried to kill a dog unable to put up a fight. The dog managed to cling to life but suffered a ruptured right eye, damage to the brain, and fractures in her front legs and paws. Her condition was so critical that no one would have thought it strange if she’d died on the spot. It was a miracle that Somang was still alive, people said. But how did the court sentence the two assailants? All they received were light fines of one million won and five hundred thousand won, respectively.

Was it because they only had the intent to kill and didn’t go so far as to kill?

Or was the dog undervalued because it was a stray?

Then how would you explain the Eunbi incident in June 2010, which resulted in a mere two-hundred-thousand-won fine? The cat—who was brutally murdered by a female neighbor—plainly had an owner. It had been wandering around, having simply lost its way, like Bell. Instead of returning the cat to its owner, however, the attacker tortured it in confinement with ruthless and unrelenting violence before tossing it off a high-rise building. When the incident became widely known, the assailant—rather than reflect on her crimes—went after the cat’s owner to assault and threaten him.

How about the following cases?

In a fit of rage after a fight with his wife, a man flung a cat and her litter of kittens to their death from the seventeenth floor of an apartment building and was handed a fifty-thousand-won fine; another man, who burned the eyes of at least eight puppies with a lighter, made them swallow razors, and subjected them to all sorts of atrocities, was fined a hundred thousand won. The courts imposed a sum that was little more than the price of a bottle of liquor for murdering and torturing animals. What do you think of such occurrences, Ms. Moon?

I don’t believe in the law. In the end, it will always give way before men, before money, and before humans.

Unfortunately, Bell’s owner was a forty-year-old woman, and poor. Meanwhile, the suspect who’d murdered Bell—who likely lived in the same neighborhood—was male. The greatest disadvantage of all was that while the victim was an animal, the assailant was human. For the injured party, entrusting the matter to the law was bound to be a losing game. The woman therefore decided not to leave it to the court. She judged it was best not to do so, even for the dead dog’s sake. After receiving an apology from the suspect, she planned to forget the whole incident.

Did the woman know who the suspect was from the start? Of course not. At least, not until he turned up of his own accord.

One Sunday evening, the suspect came to see her. When she laid eyes on him, the woman was stunned. It was the same child who’d contacted her after discovering the dog’s body. The boy probably told her something like this:

“I’m very sorry. It was I who killed your dog. I was riding along on my bike when I hit the dog in passing without realizing it. I thought it was just a garbage bag at first. But when I realized it was a dog, my only thought was to run away. At my age, everyone makes that kind of mistake. On the outside, they act brave, but inside, they’re all just cowards. I’ll accept any punishment you decide to give me.”

Even as he apologized to a woman who could have been his mother, the boy didn’t appear at all nervous. He seemed to her—unusually for kids these days—conscientious and resolute. The woman felt tender concern. The thought of the dead Bell made her tremble, but the suspect was close to her son in age, and when she saw how, in remorse, he’d sought her out personally, her loathing dissipated. Instead, she worried for the boy and consoled him.

“I understand. Now, off you go home. Everything will be all right.”

Isn’t this terribly unfair?

It was the boy who’d committed a crime, and yet he was the one being consoled. Then, who was going to console the woman? Who was going to console Bell, who had shuddered in fear before being ruthlessly murdered?

Now, I wonder—did the boy truly feel remorse for his crime?

In fact, did he even realize that he’d committed a crime?

I believe the boy must pay a price. That’s what I thought then, and my feelings haven’t changed since. I don’t trust everything he said, either. Hit by a bicycle? If that’s really what happened, the dog’s cervical vertebrae wouldn’t have fractured that badly. And that would mean the boy was lying—since, judging by the state of Bell’s body when it was discovered, it was clear that someone had deliberately killed the dog. Even if what the boy claimed was true, further injury must have been inflicted afterward.

From his earlier encounter with her as a witness, the boy would have learned that the victim’s family was a vulnerable middle-aged woman. He’d also have found out from their conversation somehow that she had a teenage son. This woman, his clever mind must have decided, will certainly forgive a boy her son’s age.

Yes, he guessed correctly.

She didn’t report him to the police.

He’s a gifted and intelligent boy. He’s bright enough not to have missed out on the top rank in his class for all three years of middle school. I heard he even competed in the International Mathematical Olympiad as a member of the national team. I’ve seen. . .