The love of language from both of them certainly comes through in this collection. Anton Hur is always great, having been awarded a PEN/Heim grant. She also translates Russian and Polish into Korean while having written three novels and story collections. The South Korean author has a PhD in Slavic literature and teaches Russian language and literature and science fiction studies at Yonsei University. 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.īora Chung is quite impressive. These are stories about survival that reveal the evils of survival at the expense of another person and often lead to vicious consequences. Brilliantly translated into English by Anton Hur, these are stories that will worm into your subconscious and haunt you long after finishing particularly through the way they latch onto primal fears as well as social orders of patriarchy and capitalism to dredge up their sinister nature. From body horror to sci fi and fables, these ten stories will dazzle as much as they disturb you across their surreal landscape of ghastly narratives. Bora Chung seemingly has a map to these vicious hotspots and details them across the variety of stories in her outstanding collection, Cursed Bunny. If you lift up the stones of reality you’ll often find cold, cruel evils scatter from beneath. Chung is peeling back our eye lids, holding them open, forcing us to witness nightmarish horrors of the body and mind, fables that inspire fear a brutal reality that is just undeniable.‘ I feel like I’m being given permission to stay alive.’ Cursed Bunny is the kind of collection that would warrant half a dozen trigger warnings: rape, incest, extreme violence to name some, and abject horror. Chung’s English publisher calls the collection ‘genre defying’, a phrase used often enough, but in this case very much apt. There is little offered in the way of hope, or grace, or relief, especially in the Cronenberg-esque body horror of some of the more visceral stories, but with Hur’s crisp clean translation of Chung’s effective, simple language, it is hard to stop reading.

The collection can admittedly feel relentlessly bleak at times, disturbing and frightening but with a staunch moral compass. More abject horror stories, that may make you feel like you can’t look away from a nasty, violent train wreck. While the conceit may disgust some and amuse others, Chung plays it straight all the way through, never cracking a smile.

Cursed bunny book review