Review by Frank Plowright
Police detective Kyung Hoon Jin has endured a grim few years. His wife was the random victim of a killer whose sentence was lenient due to his drug intake responsible for him not being in control, and Kyung now knows his son is at least complicit in the killer’s own murder. This is a world where people are being told they’re destined for Hell, and when their final moment will be, a process now referred to as a demonstration. The leader of the New Truth Society has been exploiting this, picking up further followers with each successive case, culminating in a televised demise. The Hell Bound 1 ended, though, as he confessed to Kyung he’d received his own message about death twenty years previously and his time was now up. He believed he’d done nothing to merit such a fate, and innocence is a theme Yeon Sang-ho picks up on rapidly.
Volume 2 begins several years after the ending to Volume 1. The New Truth Society has a new leader and widespread influence, and is now calling for all sins to be made public. Disagreeing with the fundamentalists is unwise and can have consequences, and there’s a masked mob called Arrowhead considering it acceptable to beat people to death if they won’t confess their sins.
Bravely and surprisingly, Yeon discards almost every character seen in the previous volume and approaches the circumstances with a new cast, primarily new father and TV editor Young-jae Bae, who operates in a sinister new world where the demonstrations are now routinely televised. So are segments of the New Truth Society attempting to force confessions of sin in the moments before death, while families of victims have to endure further distress via association with sin. However, Bae discovers there is a glimmer of hope.
Artist Choi Gyu-seok was astonishingly good in the previous volume, and it would be equally astonishing were his high standards not maintained here. Anguished faces are common, people either contemplating imminent death or reacting to scale extending from bullying to mental torture, and Choi’s people transmit their moods. This is amid plain, but effective backgrounds and distinctive people.
A dystopian society where a manipulative religious organisation wields undesirably high influence isn’t a new idea, but Yeon applying it to a world otherwise very little removed from ours heightens unease. As in the first volume, Yeon carries on conversations too long, even acknowledging there’s much to discuss, but The Hell Bound nonetheless remains a taut thriller as the pressures on Bae are cranked up. Some might be disappointed at the lack of explanation regarding the bigger picture. How are the predictions generated and where do the murderous monsters come from? That’s missing the point about a series concerned with human behaviour in unexpected times, not a horror mystery. To some extent the path taken also exonerates avenues not explored, such as whether people could commit suicide before their due date, and placid acceptability of the monsters as unstoppable.
Toward the end Yeon maximises the thriller aspects of what’s been set in motion, and proves a master at generating tension through revelations, readers shown things the protagonists don’t know. Yet he remains true to the appalling society he’s generated and by the end has established a point of possible change. It’s spark of hope amid a bleak view of humanity providing a page turning thriller.
