Where the Dead Hunger

A Korean-American folklore researcher inherits her estranged grandmother's estate in a remote Japanese mountain village — and discovers she has seven days to prevent the dead from walking.

Jisoo Park has spent her career studying the supernatural at a safe academic distance. When she arrives at her grandmother's estate expecting paperwork, she finds ritual objects she has only ever seen in archives, walls carved with symbols she has studied but never believed were real, and a village that has been waiting for her.

The blood moon rises in seven days. Jisoo is the last keeper of a 500-year-old pact — a forbidden ceremony that must be performed to keep the ancestors of two bloodlines dormant. If she fails, the village dies. The only person who can guide her through it is Ryu Takahashi: the brooding village guardian whose family has enforced the ritual for fifteen generations, and who will do whatever it takes to ensure the ceremony is performed — even if that means forcing her hand.

What neither of them planned for was each other.

As Jisoo trains for the ceremony, the seal on the gate between the living and the dead begins to crack. Villagers hear the voices of their dead relatives at night. A man is found hollow-eyed and smiling at the edge of the forest. One ancestor — a woman killed three hundred years ago for refusing the pact — begins to break through, and she is not angry without reason.

The deeper Jisoo goes, the more she understands: the ritual was never designed to honor the dead. It was designed to silence them. And the grandmother who failed before her left only four words behind.

Listen to Mirae.