Cursed Bunny: Shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize

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As always with Honford Star, the reader is immediately struck by the stunning cover art, here by Choi Jaehoon/werkgraphic.

At the hospital, she is coldly informed that she now needs a male partner for the sake of her fetus. Not to say, Anton Hur also did a wonderful job with the translation, making it an easy and quick read. I needed to look away from the page now and then but I felt like cheering all the way through because Bora Chung has written something so brutal and perfect. We offer 1st class (express) or 2nd class (standard) postage options, and use Royal Mail as our primary postal service. In the ten short tales in this book, Chung masterfully combines elements of horror, fantasy, and magical realism to create a fresh and original take on 'genre-defying'.I enjoyed reading it and would recommend it, but for me it was a little uneven, and though some of the stories are powerful and moving, others are rather difficult to comprehend. I believe readers of horror might find some of the later stories a wan imitation of things they have read before. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. There are hints of the absurd and the surreal woven through Chung’s narratives which she highlights through twists on vampirism, magical transformations, and mystical, doppelganger-like figures. Otherwise, what could have been a day full of fun memories turns into a hot, grumpy kind of day when all the best things happened when the gates first opened and the heat of the sun didn’t burn your skin and suck you dry.

Generally when Bora Chung’s characters become greedy for power, money or social gain they will suffer. Son relatos extraños, sumamente fantásticos e impregnados de cultura coreana (que fue lo que más me gustó). And because we are in the wonderfully warped world of Bora Chung’s fiction, the woman proceeds to nonchalantly flush it away and leave the bathroom. As for the story itself ; it started off great and creepy but it was a bit disappointing towards the end for me. Then I’ll go far away from here and live by my own means, so please, just keep using the toilet like you always have.My body was created with the things you dumped down the toilet, like your fallen-out hair and the feces you wiped off your behind. She goes slightly insane with the thought of it growing in her toilet while her family around her seem nonchalant. Had some giant trapped inside the cave of the night sky struck their chains against some unimaginably large wall to create the stars?

As for my personal preferences, the closer to magical realism or fantasy and farther from typical horror, the better. Anton Hur’s translation skilfully captures the way Chung’s prose effortlessly glides from being terrifying to wryly humorous. Her collection covers a cross-section of subgenres: there’s the slightly pulpy “The Frozen Finger” which read like an outline for a not-so-great Twilight Zone episode; the feminist, body horror of “The Embodiment” and The Head”; while “Snare,” “Scar” and “Cursed Bunny” have a fable-like quality; there’s even a nod to SF in the slightly formulaic “Goodbye My Love” which draws on Mori's "Uncanny Valley. The stories effectively mix genres (anti-realist would perhaps be a good label) and also horror with humour.

Some stories have elements of fantasy others of SF, historical fiction, feminist literature but all share a horror flavour and are very well written (and translated). Having said that, I had some wickedly entertaining discussions with my buddy and two of my co-workers who were enticed to read the first two stories when I wouldn’t shut up about them!

The style varies wildly: ‘Goodbye, My Love’, a tale of AI gone awry, wouldn’t be out of place in an Alexander Weinstein collection; ‘Ruler of the Winds and Sands’ reads like a forgotten fairytale; ‘Reunion’, less outlandish than the others, is a subdued story of ghosts and twisted love set in Poland.

Okay, maybe I’m getting carried away with this silly analogy, because Bora Chung does have a clever mind and quite the imagination. Stories such as Scars—the longest in the collection and quite possibly my favorite—feel much greater than their length, exploring a lot of ideas and covering a lot of territory while recognizing a novel-length would be too much.