14 Jun / Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur [in Booklist]
*STARRED REVIEW
Bestselling Korean author Bora Chung is a genre-defying polyglot. She’s a Yale MA-ed, Indiana University PhD-ed translator of Russian and Polish modern literature into Korean who writes an amalgam of speculative, ghostly, literary horror fiction. Her glorious anglophone debut, enabled by award-winning Anton Hur, is poised to shock and delight.
Women in trouble populate the majority of Chung’s strange tales, including “The Head,” in which a lumpy talking head lives in the toilet, continuously forming itself from a woman’s waste. “The Embodiment” is about an unfertilized pregnancy that sends the potential mother into a matchmaking frenzy. “The Frozen Finger” features a woman trapped in a sinking car.
Betrayal looms in “Goodbye, My Love,” which is about a woman and her three robots. In “Home Sweet Home,” a couple buys a dilapidated building with a mysterious basement. “Ruler of the Winds and Sands” focuses on a naïve princess and her blind prince. In “Reunion,” a Korean woman and her Polish lover see ghosts.
The fantastical dominates in “Snare 91,” about a gold-bleeding fox and her greedy captor. “Scars,” in which an orphan sacrificed to an unseen monster escapes to another tortuous existence, and the titular “Cursed Bunny” is about a family of cursed fetish makers and the three generations they destroy.
Bizarrely enigmatic, Chung’s collection proves irresistible.
Review: “Fiction,” Booklist, June 1, 2021
Readers: Adult
Published: 2017 (Korea), 2021 (United States)