Ghost Story Club Review: Mystery Before Monster Fights

Our Ghost Story Club review in one line: it's the rare school-horror serial where staying alive means spotting what's wrong with the rules, and it'll reward you only if you can read Korean. Ghost Story Club (괴담 동아리, Goedam Dongari) is a web novel by 오직재미 (Ojikjaemi, credited as OnlyFun in English) on KakaoPage. Its webtoon is finished and officially in English; the novel isn't, on either count.

Image: KakaoPage cover art for the Ghost Story Club webtoon

What We Read: Episode 1, "The Announcement"

We read episode 1 of the Korean novel on KakaoPage on October 17, 2026. It's titled 첫 번째 괴담 - 안내 방송 (1), "The First Ghost Story: The Announcement", and it's a nasty little trap.

Lee Joon (이준) is sitting in his classroom on the first morning of high school when a game-style message window pops up welcoming him to "Nakseong High, full of mysteries and secrets." Nobody else seems to see it. Then the speaker crackles: the power is out, the TV feed is down, so the entrance ceremony will be held on the sports ground. Everyone files outside, grumbling.

The principal steps up to the podium, starts his welcome speech and his head bursts. Then a teacher's on the stage, then everyone nearest it, in a wave rolling outward. Joon runs with about three hundred panicking first-years for the main gate, which is locked. The guard won't open it without a teacher's permission, and the students turn on him for the key. Joon scrambles over the spiked gate, lands outside, thinks he's made it, and feels his own head swell "like a balloon."

[당신은 죽었습니다.] (You have died.) [체크 포인트에서 다시 시작합니다.] (Restarting from checkpoint.)

He wakes in the same dim classroom with the same message, and this time a tutorial quest: make three friends to found a club (0/3), reward ten ghost-story points and a status window. Then the speaker crackles again, word for word.

Screenshot: KakaoPage, Ghost Story Club episode 1, October 17, 2026

What makes it work is that the episode plays fair. The tell is already in the announcement: the power's out, yet the speaker works. A Korean critic, 김상훈 (Kim Sang-hoon), pointed to exactly this in a February 2024 column for The Scoop, where the way out is to ask "정전이 일어났는데 어떻게 방송은 할 수 있느냐" ("if the power is out, how can they broadcast?"). Episode 1 doesn't hand you the answer; it kills Joon first and lets you notice it yourself. That's the whole book's method in miniature.

Ghost Story Club Review: What Works

The cases are puzzles with rules. The same column says the novel brings back the ghost-story mood of the 1990s and 2000s ("1990년대, 2000년대 시기 괴담 감성을 되살렸다"), running from school legends like "학교의 7대 불가사의" (the school's seven wonders), "빨간 마스크" (the red mask) and "빨간 휴지·파란 휴지" (red tissue, blue tissue) to stories about prejudice and the occult. It credits the novel with gripping episodes and a plot that lays down a lot of foreshadowing.

Readers say the payoffs land. In an r/noveltranslations post titled "Ghost Story Club is mystery done right", Pretty_Umpire_2700 wrote that "there are so many details that make you slowly connect the dots to things that were foreshadowed earlier," and that "The mc is not some superman who can deal with everything alone". A Korean reader in the thread, Confident_West_5325, added that "in korea it's considered a hidden gem".

Korean readers back it in numbers. On October 17, 2026 the KakaoPage novel page showed 7,622.6만 views (만 is ten thousand, so roughly 76 million), a 9.9 rating and 28th place on the weekly modern-fantasy web novel chart. In a 2021 vote run by a Korean genre-fiction community and translated on r/noveltranslations, it came first overall with 158 of 1,514 votes.

Our judgment: when a literary critic and strangers on Reddit independently praise the same thing (foreshadowing), that's a strong signal. We'd still call it a bet past episode 1, since that's all we've read ourselves.

Ghost Story Club Review: What It Costs You

No English novel. We found no official English edition. Critical_Bag1 in the same thread: "Manhwa was good also, too bad novel chaps isnt translated fully". Fan translations and machine translation come up in that thread too; we don't link to unofficial copies.

A very long serial that isn't finished. KakaoPage marks it 연재 (serializing), with episode 1 dated April 1, 2020 and the two newest episodes dated October 1, 2026. It was at 591 episodes in June 2024, according to Daily Webtoon's report when the webtoon launched, so it's added roughly two hundred since.

A generic English title. Search "Ghost Story Club" in English and you'll hit unrelated story collections, fan works and TV. The dependable identifiers are 괴담 동아리, 오직재미 / OnlyFun, and KakaoPage content ID 54701995.

Screenshot: KakaoPage, Ghost Story Club web novel, October 12, 2026

The Webtoon: The Only English Way In

The webtoon is the practical route for English readers. Studio 제이플미디어 (JAYPLE MEDIA) produced it, per Daily Webtoon, and it's complete on KakaoPage at 82 episodes. Tapas carries it as Horror Story Club, "ⓒParrot Kim, HayaroB, OnlyFun / JAYPLEMEDIA", 82 episodes, marked "Completed series". Its blurb follows Lee Jun, who is "killed in a wave of gore and sent back to his first day."

Screenshot: Tapas, Horror Story Club, October 12, 2026

Two caveats. It covers only the start of the story: Shadowgear1004 placed the webtoon's last episode "around ch 57 or 58" of the novel, and RTKWi238 described its history as "axed then remake, that too got axed". Those are reader reports, not official statements, but they fit a webtoon a tenth the length of the novel. And Tapas has a closing date: its forum announcement says "The end of service date is" March 31, 2027. Our Kakao shuts down Tapas guide covers what happens to purchases.

If a site offers the full novel in English, check who holds the rights first; is the Webnovel app safe? walks through how.

Who Should Read It

Read the novel if you read Korean and like horror you solve rather than outfight. The regression and system tags will draw progression-fantasy readers, but episode 1 gives you a quest counter, not a stat grind.

Read the webtoon if you're English-only and want to know whether the premise is for you. It's official and complete, just short, and it has a hard deadline.

Skip it for now if you need a finished English prose edition. None exists, and the Korean serial is still going.

If you want game-system horror you can read in English today, My House of Horrors is the one we'd hand you: a finished Chinese serial with a system running a haunted house.

Our Take

Ghost Story Club earns its reputation from the first episode: a cheerful announcement, a wall of exploding heads, and a clue sitting in plain sight the whole time. We'd start it tonight if we read Korean. For everyone else, read Horror Story Club on Tapas before March 2027, and keep an eye out for a licensed English novel that, so far, nobody has announced.

How We Checked This

We read episode 1 of the Korean novel on KakaoPage on October 17, 2026, and re-opened both KakaoPage pages (novel and webtoon, including the latest-first episode lists) and the Tapas page that day. We also used The Scoop's 2024 column, Daily Webtoon's launch report, the Tapas shutdown notice and two r/noveltranslations threads. On October 20 we re-opened both KakaoPage pages and the Tapas page: the novel was still serializing with no new episode since October 1, and the webtoon still complete. Everything past episode 1 comes from those sources, not our own reading.

Related Reading

• Kakao Shuts Down Tapas: What It Means for Novel Readers
• What Is a System Novel?
• Children of the Holy Emperor Review

References

• KakaoPage: 괴담 동아리 web novel
• KakaoPage: 괴담 동아리 web novel, info tab
• KakaoPage: 괴담 동아리 episode 1
• KakaoPage: 괴담 동아리 webtoon
• Tapas: Horror Story Club
• Tapas Community: Important Announcement (end of service)
• The Scoop via Daum: 그 시절 괴담의 부활 [책이 된 웹소설: 괴담 동아리]
• Daily Webtoon: 웹툰 신작 - 괴담 동아리
• r/noveltranslations: Ghost Story Club is mystery done right
• r/noveltranslations: Korean Community's Top Web Novels of 2021