The wonderfully warped world of Bora Chung's fiction ... There is always an ugly, further cost to settling old scores ... Chung has assembled a marvelous tasting platter of genres: classic ghost stories, fairy tales, mythic fantasy, science fiction, dark fables, the surreal and unclassifiable horror-adjacent ... Anton Hur’s nimble translation manages to capture the tricky magic of Chung’s voice — its wry humor and overarching coolness broken by sudden, thrilling dips into passages of vivid description. Even as Chung presents a catalog of grotesqueries that range from unsettling to seared-into-the-brain disturbing, her power is in restraint. She and Hur always keep the reader at a slight distance in order for the more chilling twists to land with maximum impact, allowing us to walk ourselves into the trap.
In a mix of 10 horrifying and funny stories, some contemporary and some more archetypal, she explores human suffering and societal problems such as patriarchy and unregulated capitalism ... The strange and everyday are melded in these startling and original tales.
The monsters in Bora Chung’s story collection, Cursed Bunny, translated by Anton Hur, are sometimes less obvious, but not less terrifying. The stories defy conventional categorization ... The previous stories are equally filled with horrors and then, at last, this final story comes along presenting a relative calm. But this calm is all a facade covering up great trauma. Cursed Bunny delivers strange and bizarre fables and, through these often grotesque fairy tales, articulates a clear critique of humanity. These are not childhood bedtime stories, but morality tales; sinners are punished. It is a collection that reminds us there are monsters everywhere, even in plain sight, even if we can’t see them.
The narratives here shamble and ooze across a porous divide between highbrow absurdism and lowbrow jump scare. The balance changes from story to story, and sometimes the genre conventions feel too pat, as genre conventions will. But the more predictable moments set you up to miss a crucial step and fall right into the abyss when Chung gets weird ... Chung uses [the same] trick in half of the 10 selections here — enough that it ceases to be a shock and starts feeling like an irritant or a cop-out. Rather than disorienting you, the last-minute flip of narrative reality becomes so expected it’s almost comforting ... The expected conclusion has its pleasures. But Chung’s writing is stronger when she leans toward literary fiction’s more open forms and pursues odder ends ... Cursed Bunny at its best sets out across the rubble to find new ground.
Strange, surreal and sometimes shocking ... While the conceit may disgust some and amuse others, Chung plays it straight all the way through, never cracking a smile ... More abject horror stories, that may make you feel like you can’t look away from a nasty, violent train wreck ... The collection can admittedly feel relentlessly bleak at times, disturbing and frightening but with a staunch moral compass. 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. Chung’s English publisher calls the collection ‘genre defying’, a phrase used often enough, but in this case very much apt ... 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 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.
Her glorious anglophone debut, enabled by award-winning Anton Hur, is poised to shock and delight ... Bizarrely enigmatic, Chung’s collection proves irresistible.
A series of nightmares is one way to describe Bora Chung’s cursed tales ... Other stories read like a series of cautionary tales against capitalist greed ... What follows is an unfolding of further gruesome events that lead to murder, cannibalism and incest. What do you call a nightmare you can’t wake up from? A living hell?
Thought-provoking and blood-soaked ... There is a multifaceted dimension to these surreal and unsettling plots that manages to evade easy reading or overly simplistic messages ... Bora Chung's stories succeed at being deeply visceral experiences that do what the best fairy tales do: convey the unspeakable in a way that is nevertheless collectively understood.
Addictively bizarre and genre-defying ... Each bone-chilling tale has been translated by Anton Hur with a degree of distance, causing readers to feel increasingly uneasy throughout the book. Themes of womanhood, bodily autonomy, motherhood and family are explored with originality and grotesque imagery ... Each story ended up devouring me with how bizarre and original they were. Bora Chung knows how to construct horror well, reaching deep under my skin and nesting in a place I can’t quite shake. If 'weird' fiction or interpretative horror is up your alley, then I recommend giving Cursed Bunny a try.
Dark and visceral ... Whether borrowing from fable, folktale, speculative fiction, science fiction, or horror, Chung’s stories corkscrew toward devastating conclusions—bleak, yes, but also wise and honest about the nightmares of contemporary life ... Don't read this book while eating—but don’t skip these unflinching, intelligent stories, either.
