I am, unfortunately, a k-pop fan so I read Gorgeous Gruesome Faces

 

So, I actually got this book, Gorgeous Gruesome Faces by Linda Cheng, as a present. It was one of those that I just found out about one day and added it to a wishlist, and eventually just handed it off to someone to get for me.

The blurb says that after a shocking career-ending scandal, eighteen-year-old Sunny Lee spends her days longing for her former popstar life and cyberstalking ex-groupmate Candie. They were inseparable – before leaving tragedy and heartache in their wake. Now Candie is chasing stardom in a new K-pop competition, and Sunny can’t resist joining her. Finally, they can confront the demons in their past, like what happened that horrible night their third groupmate jumped to her death. And whether the dark, otherworldly secrets they keep had something to do with it… But when Sunny is haunted by terrifying visions, gory injuries start happening to competitors – followed by even stranger mutilations. It’s a race to survive the deadly carnage in this spellbinding sapphic thriller that will have you screaming and swooning for more.

With the mention of otherworldly, did one of the group make a literal deal with a demon or the devil or something? And then in the prologue, Sunny does mention that she and Candie tried some kind of “dark ritual”, so maybe I was going down the right path. But the end of the prologue to where both Sunny and Candie see their third group member, Mina, throw herself off the balcony of her place. It seems almost like she’s possessed, or something happened to her, and Sunny questions whether it was because of her because she couldn’t go through with the ritual. The book then does pop over to the first chapter, in the present day. Sunny almost has a panic attack in a Kroeger, and ends up spiralling and watching a bunch of Candie’s vlogs, in one of which she’ll be joining this competition in Atlanta, where Sunny had moved to, that the blurb mentions. This is when Sunny suddenly wants to join, and she consequently gets in and becomes roomies with Candie during the competition.

I did appreciate that right from the go, Sunny mentions “slave contracts” that some k-pop idols end up getting stuck in, which, considering some of the stuff that happened with groups in 2024 felt very pertinent. And in the third chapter, she mentions to the reader that before she and Candie met, she had already been following her content and fully mentions that while she knew Candie didn’t know her, she already felt like her friend. Absolutely wild given the parasocial nature of the k-pop world and how idols are often fully selling fantasies to fans. Now don’t get me wrong, while I’m saying this, I am a k-pop fan who is aware of this fan service, but at the same time, sometimes I wish to be serviced. I’m very much of the mind where I’m not blind to that fact of what’s happening, so if I want to act a little insane and pretend all of this is real, what’s the harm?

I know this book was a thriller, but even just the camp that Candie and Sunny ended up in was so intense. But the thing is, this is one of those things that of course it’s going to be intense. Once again, I am a k-pop fan, I know how intense idols and trainees have to practice. I’ve seen videos where idols have mentioned just how long they’ve had to practice. I suppose with how the final products end up, it makes sense, but it’s still intense. I refuse to watch survival shows, though. Like, Stray Kids are one of my favourites, but I will never watch their show, I’m so sorry. I’ve seen clips from it, but all of the clips I’ve seen, everyone just looks so miserable or is crying.

Something I very much also liked was, like how I mentioned it seemed like Mina was possessed, the supernatural element to this book doesn’t come like how so many other thriller or horrors do it – where it gets clunkily revealed at the end and you’re just sort of left to deal with it. It was maybe thirty/forty percent into the book where you got given this reveal about one of the characters and how they have this otherworldly connection. And the reason I liked it was because it happened earlier in the book, it meant that all the groundwork was able to be laid, and it was actually able to be explored. Whereas in other horrors, when it happens towards the end, you’re sort of just left with an exposition dump and are then expected to just go with it, as if it hasn’t just derailed how everything else has been going.

The book, thankfully, wasn’t as gory as I was expecting it to be from the blurb. I mean, yes, a girl does carve her face up with a knife, and Sunny does have a vision of a girl literally peeling her skin off but that was a vision, so I knew it wasn’t real. Although, saying that, there was a part where a man almost cut his own penis off, and I couldn’t chalk that up to being a vision sadly. The gore in this book was use sparingly enough that I was able to still enjoy it. Don’t get me wrong, when it came to the guy who almost cut his penis off, he did start hurting himself, under the influence of the otherworldly element present in the book, and some of the stuff he did prior to almost neutering himself, that was bad, and I did have to pull back for a second. But that is solely down to the fact that I’m not good with gore. In a video game it’s fine, but when I’m reading it, if it’s so graphic, obviously I’m going to be visualising it, and I’m only going to be able to see it on a real person, so I have to just take a moment with how I do it.

POV stayed with Sunny through the whole book, but it did jump between “Then” and “Now”. The “Then” parts being the story of what led up to where she was now. And when I say that, I don’t mean the whole thing, I mean the major bits. The scandal, the reveal of supernatural elements, things the girls did. It was the case of the things that got referenced in the present, you’re left wondering about them and how they all came to be, and then in the past, you end up getting to see them. I personally enjoyed that, because it meant that I got to see everything that I wanted to. You obviously know that Sunny gets into the career-ending scandal, and you end up getting to see the scandal towards the end of the book. I will say, there was a part of me that sort of wanted to see what she did afterwards that led her to where she was in the beginning of the book. I think that could have been cool.

I’ve noticed that I have a habit of often commenting that I want more content from books that I read. That I’ll want more from them, that perhaps I’ve finished the book but am not totally satisfied because I thought something more could have been drawn out from certain sections, or perhaps there were missed opportunities that weren’t taken for whatever reason. This is all leading me to say that, oddly, I thought the opposite with this book. Granted, this book only just reaches 300 pages, so it’s not exactly like it’s long – and even saying that, I don’t know that it needed to particularly be longer, because I don’t know how much more could have been pulled out of the story – but I actually feel like the last chapter could have just been completely cut, and that it wouldn’t have impacted the rest of it. I say all of this because more often than not, in horror, the ending is left open ended, like, yes, there’ll be a final girl. But even if the villain, or killer dies, they always seem to be spotted alive in some form at the end. And that’s exactly what happened in this book, the thing that was causing all the mayhem in was clearly still present in the penultimate chapter, and I feel like this book would have worked better (for me, personally) had the ending been left more open ended, as to what Sunny did once everything was over.

Overall, I liked the book. I read it all over a chunk of time that I had off work, and it felt so nice just to be able to sit and read, even if it was, and mind the pun, a little… gruesome. And it was solid. Again, I’m a k-pop fan, so I liked seeing the setting be a training camp-slash-competition. It was more so just the ending for me that knocked it down. I think I just wanted more danger or unease from the end.

Okay, bye!