The Midnight Shift by Cheon Seon-Ran

Cheon Seon-Ran’s The Midnight Shift arrives with a premise so strong it almost gleams in the dark: a vampire mystery set in a dementia ward, where a detective’s personal loss intersects with the supernatural and the societal. The concept promises emotional depth, genre tension and incisive social commentary. Yet, for all its ambition, the novel feels like an exquisite sketch that never quite becomes the portrait it could have been.

The novel begins in Incheon, where a cluster of elderly patients leap to their deaths from the same hospital window. Detective Su-Yeon, whose beloved friend lives on that floor, suspects foul play. Her superiors, jaded and incurious, dismiss the deaths as suicides born of isolation. When Su-Yeon encounters Violette, a French-Korean vampire hunter searching for her lost lover Lily, the story tilts toward the uncanny. What follows is an interlacing of timelines and tones: noir investigation, gothic romance and melancholy reflection.

Cheon’s themes of grief, loneliness, marginalisation are weighty and relevant. The novel gestures toward profound questions: how does a society treat its forgotten, its old, its queer? How do we mourn what we cannot name? Yet, these ideas are too often told rather than felt. Su-Yeon’s grief feels procedural rather than piercing, and her relationships (especially with her grandmother and colleagues) lack the emotional contour that might have grounded the novel’s strangeness. By contrast, the chapters between Violette and Lily pulse with atmosphere and yearning. Their 1980s Parisian love story, painted in chiaroscuro tones, offers flashes of what the book could have been: dangerous, romantic, alive.

The vampire lore, too, hints at invention. Cheon reimagines the creatures less as elegant predators than as metaphors for the ache of immortality and displacement. However, the mythology feels inconsistent, never quite cohering into a believable system. Readers expecting either a taut mystery or a richly built fantasy world may find themselves stranded between both. The murders are solved with more confusion than clarity, and the narrative threads of loneliness, dementia, colonial identity, and a queer love tangle rather than weave.

Stylistically, the prose (in Gene Png’s translation) has a wistful beauty. The writing drifts between the forensic and the lyrical, often evoking the quiet horror of hospital corridors and the static hum of grief. Yet this very fluidity sometimes works against the story’s pace. Momentum builds only to dissipate in reflective passages that circle the same emotional territory. It is a book that feels haunted by its own potential, content to gesture at transcendence rather than seize it.

In the landscape of Korean speculative fiction now gaining international traction, The Midnight Shift stands as a curious experiment: part police procedural, part philosophical fable, part queer tragedy. It is never uninteresting, but it leaves the reader watching from the edge of the dance floor, waiting for a rhythm that never quite catches. The premise focused on vampires, grief, and queer desire entwined in the fluorescent half-light of a hospital deserved sharper fangs. Instead, what remains is a work of mood rather than mastery, beautiful in places, but ultimately a little toothless.

Reviewer: Chris Reed

Bloomsbury