Kristy Park Kulski
author & editor of dark fiction
COMING SPRING 2027
Cracks
Horror and myth collide when a Korean American teenager’s grief summons something ancient: a water ghost that has been feeding on her family’s sorrow for decades.
Dark strands of hair crack the corners of my sight, suspended as always in the air, spidering and floating as if in liquid. Mul-gwishin. Water ghost.
Gracie Russell feels she belongs nowhere. In suburban 1990s Washington, she is constantly at sea—struggling with her biracial identity, her father's violent alcoholism, and her mother's looming mortality. When Ji-eun dies, Gracie will lose her last chance to mend their relationship. But she can already feel her mother slipping away, pulled by the tides of memory back to authoritarian 1970s South Korea. The secret she buried there has awakened something in the deep. And now it is rising.
As Ji-eun's body weakens and the autumn rains fall in torrents, the sound of dripping water haunts Gracie. Cracks form in the basement wall, exposing a crumbling passageway to a sea of liquid darkness, and Gracie is running out of time. The mul-gwishin is coming for her.
For readers of Catriona Ward and Han Kang, Cracks is a harrowing vision of heritage, violence, and the histories that possess.
Deftly mashing together notorious historical figures, feminism, and the grimmest of fairy tales, Fairest Flesh is as brutally horrifying as it is mesmeric.
"Consider me a K.P. Kulski fan for life" Paul Tremblay author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Survivor Song
Praise & Reviews
The best folk horror doesn't just scare you; it makes you reconsider your relationship to place, to heritage, to where you're standing, or trying to.
Silk & Sinew gets that. And Kristy Park Kulski, one of my favorite writers herself (and my students'), has assembled stories that explore what it means to be haunted not just by ghosts, but by history, displacement, and the impossibility of ever truly belonging anywhere.
"Essential reading"
John Yu Branscum, author, translator, and professor
Editor Kristy Park Kulski is a historian turned horror conjurer, which explains why so many stories hum with context instead of leaning on exoticism. She’s got novels under her belt and a puckish public persona that promises righteous mischief. She delivers.
"Silk & Sinew is the rare anthology that feels like a statement, not a sampler" The Blog Without A Face
About the Author
KRISTY PARK KULSKI is a Bram Stoker Award nominated, Korean-American author, historian, and vampire of patriarchal tears. Channeling a lifelong obsession with history and the morose she’s the author of gothic horrors, Fairest Flesh, and House of Pungsu, as well as the editor of the anthology Silk & Sinew, listed on NYPL's Best New Horror 2025.
Holding graduate degrees in Ancient and Classical History as well as Writing Popular Fiction, she additionally bartered nine years of her life to the U.S. Navy and Air Force and would later teach college history.
Born in Hawaii, she now resides in the woods of Northeast Ohio where she (probably) brews potions and talks to ghosts.