In a 2010 interview with the Yes24 book channel, the author of one of the best-selling series in Korean publishing history admitted that he was embarrassed by its prose. He did not think anyone had loved the books for their sentences. He added, by that account, that it took him four or five years after publication before he could bring himself to call himself a writer at all. I have met authors who were vain about their style, and a few who were relaxed about its failings, but I have not met many who said so in print, and the interview stayed with me through the autumn. The man is Lee Woo-hyuk, the series is Toemarok, and the question it left me with is what, exactly, Korean readers have been buying since 2025.
The answer is not simple, because the series has come back in four formats at once. An animated film opened in Korean cinemas in February 2025. A revised edition of the whole work, seventeen volumes in all, reached the shops that summer, and the audiobook service Willa had released every volume by late November. In June 2026 the first volumes of an official sequel appeared, with the publisher promising ten in total. Nobody revives a book four times in sixteen months out of sentiment alone. Something in it is plainly worth the trouble, and Lee’s own verdict suggests that the something is not the prose.
For readers who do not know it, a little scaffolding is needed. Toemarok, which LTI Korea, the national translation institute, lists in English as A Record of Exorcism, began in 1993 as a serial on the horror and science-fiction board of Hitel, one of the early PC networks in Korea. The board was called SUMMER, a detail I mention only because a foreign reader may take it for a pen name. Lee was not a literary man by training. According to the biographical note attached to that Yes24 interview, he had studied mechanical design at Seoul National University and was researching automotive airbags at a parts institute in the July of 1993. The first printed volume appeared in January 1994 and became a best-seller at once. The original edition ran to twenty volumes over about eight years, and Korean newspapers have long put the total sales at ten million copies or more.
The premise is easy to state. Four exorcists, each equipped for a different kind of trouble, fight demons that take over human minds. Park Yun-gyu is a trainee priest expelled from his church for defying its doctrine. Yi Hyeon-am is a martial artist who trained to avenge a brother killed by a demon. Jang Jun-hu is an orphan who can read the thoughts of humans and demons alike, and Hyeon Seung-hui is a young archaeology student. That roster is the book’s real invention. Its separate competences, doctrinal, physical, telepathic and scholarly, divide the supernatural the way an expedition divides a mountain, and they explain how a story could stretch across so many volumes without any single sentence having to carry it.
The Korea Times, introducing the animated film in 2025, wrote that the novel helped open the occult genre in Korea, where such material had not been popular before. It blended martial arts, exorcism, religion, mythology and folk legend into one adventure, and I find that mixture more persuasive as an explanation of its appeal than any claim for its style. A genre that has no established readers needs a reason for them to arrive. Four specialists with four kinds of authority are an excellent reason, because every reader can choose one of them to stand behind.
The book also arrived from outside the gate. Korean writers are customarily admitted to the profession through a formal debut, the system known as deungdan, usually by way of a newspaper contest or a literary magazine, and a serial on a bulletin board bypassed all of it. I have not come across sustained academic criticism of the series, though I would not rule out that I have simply looked in the wrong places. This much is plain: its readers never seem to have asked for credentials. The author’s modesty about his sentences sounds, to me, less like false humility than like a fair account of how the books were received.
The same interview offers two further details. Lee said that he does not write to a schedule: he prepares for a long time, sometimes for years, and then writes in large bursts, and he claimed to have once produced 450 sheets of manuscript paper in a single day. He also named playwrights among his influences, Arthur Miller and Edward Albee among them, rather than any novelist. I will not labour the point, but a writer shaped by the stage and working in bursts would be likely to think in entrances, confrontations and speeches. He would care less about the texture of a sentence than about who is standing where when the demon arrives.
I keep thinking of an Edinburgh man who did something similar a hundred years earlier. Arthur Conan Doyle, born in the city in 1859, killed Sherlock Holmes in December 1893, the very year in which Lee’s serial began. He had told his mother two years before that the detective was keeping him from better work. The public objected so loudly that Doyle eventually relented, and Holmes returned in 1903 in the story called “The Adventure of the Empty House”. Doyle regarded his historical novels as his finest achievement. His readers regarded them as something to read after Holmes.
The two cases differ in one respect, and the difference is instructive. Doyle wanted to be rid of his creation and could not manage it. Lee, on the evidence I have seen, has never tried. Korean sources record a volume of side stories in 2013, and the 2025 edition added a new one, the first fresh material in more than a decade. Now the whole world has been handed to a younger generation of characters. There is also a pleasing irony in the careers. Doyle invented the most rational mind in English fiction and ended by writing a history of spiritualism, whereas Lee began with ghosts and had been trained as an engineer. Edinburgh has never been sure which of those careers makes more sense.
What was repaired in the revivals is telling. When the publisher Elixir issued collector’s editions in 2011, Lee told the Seoul Shinmun that he had left the story alone and revised the style heavily. The 2025 edition, by contrast, is described by its publisher as correcting errors of plausibility, and the shop listings add that the series was given a new design. In other words, the author has spent fifteen years tidying the machinery while the cast stayed fixed. A writer who thinks his readers came for the prose would have rewritten the characters. Lee rewrote the sentences and kept the people, which is as clear an admission of where the value lies as any interview could supply.
The screen adaptations tell the same story from the other side. The 1998 live-action film, directed by Park Gwang-chun and starring Ahn Sung-ki, is generally remembered as a disappointment. The Korea Times reported in 2013 that it cost 2.4 billion won, sold only about 400,000 tickets, and was made without Lee’s participation, a point he raised himself. Its special-effects team did win a technical award at that year’s Blue Dragon Film Awards, which seems a modest consolation. Lee told the same newspaper that he was working on a trilogy of films of his own, and I have found no sign that it was ever made.
What did arrive, twelve years later, was the animated film directed by Kim Dong-chul, who made it as his first feature. It runs to 85 minutes and adapts only the opening episode of the novel, with the story moved into the present day and Lee credited as a creator. According to Korean reports, it reached roughly the same 400,000 admissions as the old live-action film within weeks of opening on 21 February 2025. A small, faithful adaptation succeeded where a large, unfaithful one had not. That is a lesson about fidelity to the cast, and the cast, once again, is what the audience seems to have wanted.
Of the four formats, the audiobook interests me most. Willa, the audiobook service run by Influential, had released all seventeen volumes by 24 November 2025. It gave each of the four exorcists a dedicated voice actor, with two actors sharing the part of Jang Jun-hu. I suspect that a plain sentence loses much of its stiffness when it is spoken aloud, and that a character becomes a voice very quickly. A revival of characters is exactly the kind of project that an audio edition serves well, and it is perhaps no accident that the sequel arrived within seven months of the last recording.
That sequel, Sin Toemarok, or “New Toemarok”, began publication on 23 June 2026 under the subtitle Sinse-pyeon. As the Segye Ilbo reported, it is set about twenty years after the end of the original. The four veterans return alongside a new central figure, Kim Yang-du, and a younger generation of exorcists. The description on the retailers’ pages says that a reader need not know the earlier books, which is the commercial logic of the whole enterprise. The publisher, listed as Vanta in the shop records, plans ten volumes in all: three in this first arc, three in a second and four in a third.
A critic should keep a cold head here, and I would put the doubts plainly. Ten million copies sold across nearly thirty years is not a figure that one film or one sequel is bound to repeat. A cinema run of 400,000 tickets is a different kind of number from a long career in paperback, and I do not claim to compare them. A plan for ten volumes is a promise and not an achievement. A first-time reader in 2026, opening the sequel with no memory of the 1990s, must decide whether four exorcists who were new in 1993 are interesting in their own right. I cannot predict that, and neither, I suspect, can the publisher.
What returns, then, is an arrangement: a priest, a fighter, a mind-reader and a student, standing in the same doorway and looking at whatever has come through it. Doyle’s public made the same choice with a pair of men in a sitting room. I came to Holmes as a boy and to the exorcists as a grown man, and I notice that I have never needed either of them to be well written. The author seems to have reached the same conclusion about his own sentences long ago, in an interview where he said so, and I am inclined to take him at his word.
Recommended Resources
☞ Purchase (Korean Edition): Toemarok (퇴마록), Lee Woo-hyuk, Aladin Bookstore
☞ The English Translation: To my knowledge there is no English translation of Toemarok.
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
※ Published under the author's editorial persona. See the About page for how this comes to be.
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