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If ‘Misery’ Was About Boy Bands, and Had a Happy Ending
“Superfan,” by Jenny Tinghui Zhang, explores the parallel struggles of a K-Pop-inspired star and the lonely college student who adores him.
Credit...Bianca Bagnarelli
Teddy Wayne
Teddy Wayne is the author, most recently, of “The Winner.” His next novel, “The Au Pair,” comes out in June.
Jan. 31, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET
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SUPERFAN, by Jenny Tinghui Zhang
Though coined in 1956, the term “parasocial interaction” — a one-sided relationship, especially between a fan and a celebrity — has skyrocketed in the age of social media. It is in the still semi-innocent days of 20…
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If ‘Misery’ Was About Boy Bands, and Had a Happy Ending
“Superfan,” by Jenny Tinghui Zhang, explores the parallel struggles of a K-Pop-inspired star and the lonely college student who adores him.
Credit...Bianca Bagnarelli
Teddy Wayne
Teddy Wayne is the author, most recently, of “The Winner.” His next novel, “The Au Pair,” comes out in June.
Jan. 31, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET
When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.
SUPERFAN, by Jenny Tinghui Zhang
Though coined in 1956, the term “parasocial interaction” — a one-sided relationship, especially between a fan and a celebrity — has skyrocketed in the age of social media. It is in the still semi-innocent days of 2014 that Jenny Tinghui Zhang sets her second novel, “Superfan.”
Through elegantly and empathetically written alternating chapters, we track both sides of fame’s one-way mirror. Minnie, a shy freshman at the University of Texas who immigrated to Colorado from China as a child,, compensates for her loneliness by following HOURglass, a new K-Pop-inspired boy band. She loves “the boys” for their innocuous beauty* *and even more anodyne ballads; their ethnic makeup (three of the foursome are Asian American) holds particular appeal for her.
She is most drawn to Eason, stage name Halo, whose hardscrabble background and brooding charisma land him the role of the group’s “bad boy.” Zhang details the unglamorous aspects of pop stardom with granular realism: the intense training and diet regimens, the exploitative management, the grind of travel.
These two outsiders’ parallel tracks must eventually collide, as nearly every parasocial story tends to do. The ur-text remains “The King of Comedy,” Martin Scorsese’s 1982 film about a delusional stand-up comedian who ultimately holds hostage the talk-show host he both reveres and resents. (In music, Eminem’s portrait of fan fanaticism in “Stan” has also spawned a ubiquitous neologism.)
The question of whether Minnie will become one of the genre’s pathological worshipers begins by the second page, when “a new hunger blooms, the desire to know every single thing about these boys until she brims with them.”
Her idolatry ramps up after a sexual assault, fueled by a toxic online fan group that call themselves the Hellians. Their posts about the boys, interpolated in the novel, are composed with territorial lunacy: “If you compare pictures of him now with pictures from just a month ago, you can see his wrists are thinner (I measured them — there’s a 1.2 mm difference, which is significant). … If we don’t act soon, he’s going to die from heartbreak.”
Meanwhile, the band contends with the trials of fame: obnoxious radio D.J.s, a taskmaster impresario and, of course, their invasive fans. To get ahead of pictures of one of the boys snorting coke, their label contrives a fake relationship between Eason and a bandmate. (That a gay love affair is what distracts from a drug scandal is an unintentionally comic statement about the shifting intolerances of this new generation.) Also driving Eason’s story is a family secret, doled out slowly.
Zhang writes sensitively about the aftermath of Minnie’s assault: “He had drilled a hole in her head and pooled himself in, so that every silence, every lapse, belonged to him. … In the shower, Minnie would rake at her skin until small pipettes of red soaked through. … But the skin always grew back. In the morning, there he was again.”
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Eason, just as lonely and wounded as she is, is more alienated by fame than his bandmates even as he grows dependent on it: “He can only become worthy of love again because he is Halo, not Eason. And he will only be able to keep that love as Halo, not Eason. … This kind of happiness is something he has been searching for his entire life, and now that he has it, he wants more. He wants so much more.”
It’s unfair to the author to wish that she’d written Minnie a degree or two closer to the deranged Annie Wilkes of “Misery,” or Eason, like the object of desire in “The King of Comedy,” as something of a jerk. But once it becomes clear that, in this novel’s gentle, understated hands, neither one will lose themselves completely to the thrall of postmodern celebrity, the narrative pulse slows.
We sense early on that Minnie won’t become a violent stalker, and we know all along that Eason isn’t really a bad boy at heart. When his secret is finally revealed, it comes off as pardonable, and how she fits into its excavation requires some creaky, implausible plotting that resists fully implicating her. There’s never much doubt that the novel’s villains are nearly everyone but these two.
Yet even if the redemptive ending of “Superfan” doesn’t quite land, it deserves plaudits for bucking cliché in the parasocial canon. So does Zhang, for humanizing and giving depth to one of our more derided subcultures and musical genres. It should win her new admirers — some of whom might be saved from turning into Hellians themselves.
SUPERFAN | By Jenny Tinghui Zhang | Flatiron | 301 pp. | $29.99
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