Bora Chung seemingly has a map to these vicious hotspots and details them across the variety of stories in her outstanding collection, Cursed Bunny. There’s also a story about robots, “Goodbye, My Love”, that I enjoyed quite a lot that spoke to the process of aging. Chung illustrates how egotism can lead people to commit heinous crimes against others and it's appalling to think this is also the reality of today.

The greatest horrors are the ones that feel very close to everyday reality and tend to revolve around the evils people can put others through, particularly for their own benefit. Anton Hur’s translation skillfully captures the way Chung’s prose effortlessly glides from being terrifying to wryly humorous. Surreal and grotesque, with gestures towards supernatural, fabular and weird fiction, this is a mixed bag of stories. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The story is a surreally humorous yet oddly upsetting tale that it was a brilliant piece for putting the wind up with that opening.Mostly what stuck with me since then are the first two stories – “The Head” and “The Embodiment” (and a couple of others. It was about two-thirds the size of an adult’s head and resembled a lump of carelessly slapped-together yellow and gray clay, with a few scattered clumps of wet hair. The final four longer tales just didn't really work for me and feel like Chung is trying things out without the assurance of voice and vision that characterises the early stories. I think the lack of pretentious similise and metaphors gives it a feeling of bluntness to cut the author in the gut and to get them to really understand what the story is about. The Frozen Finger (차가운 손가락) is a rather surreal ghost story, and Snare (덫) a genuinely creepy folk-tale type of story about a man who finds a fox, caught in a snare, that bleeds gold.

the only two times i've felt patriotic this year are when i saw kim soo hyun on the street and also when i read frozen finger from this collection. Anyone who loved Cursed Bunny would likely get a lot out of Kristen Roupenian’s You Know You Want This, and vice versa. Several other stories in the collection are also about the exploitation of the disadvantaged by the power hungry — most notably “Snare,” in which a man discovers a fox with golden blood and begins to harvest it; and “Scars,” where a boy is abused first by a literal monster, then by monstrous humans. I don't actively ask this question every time I pick up a book, but I do put an awful lot of books down, and leave them unread.Anton Hur’s translation skilfully captures the way Chung’s prose effortlessly glides from being terrifying to wryly humorous. More importantly, however, a panel of judges have taken their time to evaluate and consider this book seriously, for presumably, its literary and artistic merits. Not for the faint of heart—some of these are truly unsettling in the best way—Bora Chung’s horrors are an absolute feast of fun and dark insights that won’t ever be forgotten.

Aside from that, each narrative focuses on human values such as greed, power, money, and gain, and each concludes with a message.I personally don’t like forcing people to read books but I will break that rule – do invest in these stories. We were developed to aid such humans and enhance their quality of life… Just a few replacement parts or a software upgrade could help us serve you for a decade longer, but we’re treated like trash as soon as there is a new model. For instance, Goodbye my love has some elements of science fiction, Scars of fantasy, Reunion of a ghost and love story, Snare of a myth or fairytale.

Since these stories are structured like fairy-tales it makes a lot of sense that there is a moral tale embedded within the text.After reading this book (and Happy Stories, Mostly) I can no longer say that I do not like short stories.