Yeji Y. Ham

Yeji Y. Ham is a Korean Canadian author whose debut novel, The Invisible Hotel (2024), is a horror novel set in the fictional Korean village of Dalbit, where families keep ancestral remains within their homes and dreams of a labyrinthine, decaying hotel begin to intrude on daily life. The book follows a woman confronting a cascade of personal crises -- job loss, a parent's death, family estrangement, and a brother's military service near the North Korean border -- as inherited trauma and the legacies of the Korean War surface through the novel's uncanny architecture and imagery. Critics praised its sensory, poetic prose, with Kirkus Reviews calling it "ethereal" and reviewers comparing its treatment of space and memory to Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space.