Dessert has not yet been served when the room starts to tilt. Four students and an assistant sit at a mahogany table in the Grand Magistra’s private lounge, and the immortal who invited them has just stepped out to take a phone call. Someone laughs who never laughs. The wine pools on the varnish and becomes blood. Then shadows begin to flicker across the plates, and Larkspur Lee looks up to find the chandeliers thick with moths from every corner of the world, one small white one among them that she has seen before. She runs, out of the building, across a path that seems to flow red, and into a hedge maze that whispers her name. Mothsblood by Lynn D. Jung turns its most important evening into a fever, and it is a long time before the fever breaks.
What Lynn D. Jung Knows About Hunger
Lark is the reason to read the book and, at times, the reason to set it down. She arrives at a hidden alchemical university in Paris with secondhand loafers, a chambre de bonne she can barely afford, and a sideline selling home-brewed drugs to richer classmates so she can make rent. Everyone around her has a surname in gilt on some wall. She has a mother in California who tells people her daughter is doing a doctorate in insects, and a grandmother up the coast she has not spoken to since high school.
The mother matters more than she first appears to. In one of the flashback chapters, an eight-year-old Lark is shipped to Seoul to nurse her mother through cosmetic surgery paid for by a boyfriend who never shows up, running to a convenience store at all hours with a borrowed coin purse. The scene is told plainly, without self-pity, and it explains a great deal: why Lark checks her glamours before every entrance, why she reads rooms like balance sheets, why being chosen by anyone powerful feels like rescue. Mothsblood by Lynn D. Jung draws a straight line from that hotel room to the Paris lecture halls, and never once underlines it.
What she wants is not money. It is permanence. The immortal at the head of the school is choosing an apprentice, and apprentices of the Deathless have a habit of never dying. In Mothsblood by Lynn D. Jung, that longing is drawn without apology. Lark manipulates the boy who likes her, sabotages a labmate with a substance that comes back to haunt her, and recalculates everyone she meets as an obstacle or a door. The novel does not ask for sympathy so much as comprehension, and it earns it by showing where the hunger was planted.
Witches on Her Mother’s Side
The richest vein in the book runs underneath the alchemy. Lark’s grandmother kept a cottage that smelled of saenggangcha and sea salt, traded charms to old sailors, and refused payment for her magic even when the milk in the fridge was a week past its date. To the European establishment, that kind of craft is witchcraft: small, superstitious, beneath notice. To Lark, it was the first door into the world she now claws at.
Jung keeps returning to who gets called an alchemist and who gets called a witch. A classmate sneers that Lark must descend from primitive hedge magicians. The provost, a Korean man from Busan, is the only faculty member she half recognises as kin, and the novel slowly turns that recognition into something more complicated. The old Parisian legend of the Nicolas Flamel household becomes a story about who owns the secret of eternal life, and who pays for it. Mothsblood by Lynn D. Jung is at its most original here, and the closing pages bring the thread home with real tenderness.
A Knight Who Carries Lightning
Then there is Violaine. She appears in the maze with a face full of piercings and lights a flame in her bare palm with nothing but a gold earring, which no properly trained alchemist should be able to do. She is a Knight, the immortals’ enforcer, and she has the same brand Lark is hiding. The two of them circle each other through most of the book, trading insults, then favours, then a ring.
It is a slow burn in the truest sense, and readers who come for a sapphic romance should know it is a long time smouldering. When it catches, it carries weight, because both women are scarred by the same people. There is a third presence in the room, too. Lark is followed through Paris by the memory of a girl she loved as a child and lost in circumstances the book withholds until very late, and the way that ghost keeps surfacing in other faces gives the romance an unsettling double exposure. Violaine’s stubborn, almost naive belief that someone will protect them is the perfect foil for Lark’s certainty that nobody ever has. The mentor who shaped Lark, a celebrated scholar who first noticed her at twelve, looms over everything between them, and the book is unflinching about the shape of that harm. The novel opens with its own warning, and it is earned: abuse, addiction, self-destruction, death and bodily violation all sit on the page, and none of it is gestured at lightly.
Lynn D. Jung and the Multiplying Moths
The trouble is repetition. The white moth with its red-tufted legs, the dead girl with the stained mouth, the flames burning on Lark’s skin whenever danger approaches: each is striking the first time and close to mechanical by the twentieth. Mothsblood by Lynn D. Jung often uses a hallucination where a revelation should be, and the investigation into the murder drifts while Lark is haunted for another chapter.
The immortals are a second problem. Introduced as remote and terrible, the Deathless become grotesques at a party when the plot needs a crowd to react: one burns, one rots, one squints through insect eyes. The villain’s late scheme depends on everyone around him failing to notice the obvious, and a major public scene plays more as spectacle than as strategy. In a novel this attentive to how power actually protects itself, the cartoonish turn jars.
The prose, finally, is lavish to a fault. Paris rains for most of the book, and the weather is personified so often that it becomes wallpaper. Sentences stack similes three deep. The richness suits a gothic novel, but a firmer edit would have let the best images breathe.
After the Last Page
For all that, Mothsblood by Lynn D. Jung is a first novel with genuine nerve. It refuses to make its heroine nice, it understands that the people who harm us often look like the people who chose us, and it ends somewhere smaller and wiser than its opening ambition. Readers who loved the academic bargain with the underworld in Katabasis by R.F. Kuang will recognise the territory, and those drawn to rotting grandeur and a predator who wants to live forever should try Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which the novel openly converses with, is the third companion, and perhaps the most useful, since Mothsblood by Lynn D. Jung shares its fascination with what makers owe the things they make.
It begins with moths circling a light nobody else can see. Mothsblood by Lynn D. Jung spends its whole length teaching its heroine to look away from that light, and it is worth staying for the moment she does.