Ha's writing derives its strength not from updating or subverting known tropes, but from her ability to create — and Hong's ability to translate — an atmosphere so sinister it becomes impossible to tell the innocuous from the dangerous, the supernatural from the mundane ... Ha writes with keen social awareness, consistently meshing feminism with class criticism ... Her protagonists' exhaustion and frustration work in tandem with her spooky prose, ultimately reminding readers that our world can be as dark as any fairytale.

A crucial voice in the burgeoning movement of feminist fiction from South Korea, Ha is a master of atmospheric suspense whose stories use shock and horror to dissect contemporary gender-based violence and its historical roots ... We could call Ha’s personal genre 'domestic surrealism' ... Janet Hong’s translation and rendering of Ha’s style is so uniformly applied that it brings an extra cohesiveness to the collection. In fact, it is precisely the detached coolness of this voice that is so effectively disturbing in conjunction with the grotesque facts it describes. They are tales that could appear sprawled across the front page of a tabloid, but Hong treats them without a hint of sensationalism ... While her characters are decidedly plain (corpse notwithstanding), Ha’s landscapes are elegant and painterly, expertly exposing the fissures between appearances and reality ... Each story is a clever investigation into the tensions between the personal and the communal, violence and peace—particularly in the lives of women. The moments of true horror are carefully rationed, showing the author’s mastery of atmospheric suspense. Yet she makes no real conclusions or judgments—the stories are cold cases. Ha peels back the layers encasing crimes of hatred, misogyny, and despair, but never quite lays blame or follows them through to see justice done. Is the jury out, or is she leaving the verdict to the reader? Perhaps she is unwilling to appease our need for a moral to the story—after all, these aim to be depictions of real life, not fables ... After an acclaimed debut, Bluebeard’s First Wife is a forceful and impressive second collection. These stories succeed in unsettling us, not only by exposing our worst nightmares about what lies behind forbidden doors, but also by asking us whose fault it was to enter. The answer is clear, isn’t it?

Misdirection abounds in the collection, a technique which naturally—and delightfully so—acts in juxtaposition to the author’s straightforward writing style. While beautifully crafted, most of Ha’s sentences are succinct in structure and detail, with only occasional pitstops for mischievous flourishes ... Upon first blush, the stories of Ha Seong-Nan appear both accessible and familiar in ambition. They rely on common narrative sparks and are presented without stylistic overkill. Yet this veneer permits Ha to shake each story like a snow globe, blurring the obvious and constructing something new and unpredicted ... We can all only hope that Janet Hong’s terrific translations continue and that they provide the English-speaking world opportunities for enchantment by a master storyteller for years to come.

Best-selling Korean author Ha and award-winning Canadian translator Hong are two-for-two at spectacular pairing, repeating the successful partnership of Ha’s collection, Flowers of Mold (2019), with another sensational, 11-story collaboration ... Despite a significant body count, Ha’s provocative narratives never devolve into the maudlin, showcasing instead sly moments of macabre fascination and startling dark comedy.

Ha Seong-Nan’s stories unfold like folk tales. Their clear, tightly focused problems and the counterintuitive way characters go about solving them leave room for hubris to be punished, for ironies to click into place in their final moments. But, like the book’s title, the premises in the Korean writer’s second collection published in English are often red herrings, as Ha eschews even the kind of 'happy' ending that the original Bluebeard story provided for far grimmer conclusions. As with her previous collection, last year’s Flowers Of Mold, in Bluebeard’s First Wife, Ha favors ruin and decay over tidiness, defying narrative expectations and crafting nightmarish visions that spark with dark energy.

These stories act as acute reminders of how our supposedly normal lives can quickly become much stranger ... 'Bluebeard’s First Wife' shreds the illusion of a picture-perfect life, but less compellingly and, unlike her other stories, it teeters on the edge of melodrama. In Ha’s best stories, secrets stay unrevealed ... seriously impressive. The winner of multiple prestigious Korean literary awards and acclaimed by authors such as Nazanine Hozar and Susan Choi, Ha is known for being a master of description and reading her stories is often akin to being plunged into an otherworld. Crystalline images and motifs, expertly captured by translator Janet Hong, glisten under the surface ... Ha’s writing still manages to be topical, especially in pushing against the constraints of society. She spins out unnerving tales that touch on LGBT issues, sexual assault and suicide. If anything, Ha’s stories feel even more pertinent now.

In stark, unflinching prose, Seong-nan plumbs feelings of isolation in a modern world in which characters often find themselves bent under the force of traditional expectations, with new dangers looming every day. This is a uniformly captivating collection of stories that could be incidents from a local paper, but which are no less haunting for it.

Ha is invested not in the myth itself but in what it helps us see. In her hands, the fairy-tale works as a photo filter, bringing into clearer relief her actual subject: the horrors of daily contemporary life. This is a place where at your most vulnerable, you will encounter no fairy godmother, no knight will rush in on a horse ... Ha is not concerned with updating fairy-tales, she is not seeking to transport readers to a mythical realm. A concise lesson, the neat happy bow of a fairy-tale ending, is never offered. She instead uses myth to make visible the human condition—one marked by disappointment, loneliness, and loss.

... outstanding ... delivers heavy doses of guilt, hope, and pain ... In straightforward prose, Ha’s simple, devastating tale sets the mood for what’s to come. The title story brilliantly explores the secrets and silence inside the microcosm of an opportunistic marriage, as Ha flips the switch from ordinary domestic descriptions to harrowing violence, the tone perfectly measured in Hong’s translation ... Dark, strange, and simultaneously cohesive and diverse, these stories show a superb writer in full force.