ŷ������

��I feel like I’m being given permission to stay alive.��

If you lift up the stones of reality you’ll often find cold, cruel evils scatter from beneath. Bora Chung seemingly has a map to these vicious hotspots and details them across the variety of stories in her outstanding collection, Cursed Bunny. 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. 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. These are stories about survival that reveal the evils of survival at the expense of another person and often lead to vicious consequences. 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.

Bora Chung is quite impressive. The South Korean author has a PhD in Slavic literature and teaches Russian language and literature and science fiction studies at Yonsei University. She also translates Russian and Polish into Korean while having written three novels and story collections. Anton Hur is always great, having been awarded a PEN/Heim grant. The love of language from both of them certainly comes through in this collection.

There is something so effortless in the way these stories can occupy a wide variety of genres and tropes yet feel so fresh and balanced together under one binding (that has exquisite cover art). Bora Chung deftly moves from haunted house stories (Home Sweet Home) to surreal thrillers (The Frozen Finger) to even a story about aspects of AI without causing the reader any whiplash (the sci-fi story, Goodbye, My Love is arguably less fresh than some but still charming). Her prose feels very matter of fact, and when she drifts into fable-like territory such as Ruler of the Winds and Sands it feels very at home in the narrative. Stories such as Scars—the longest in the collection and quite possibly my favorite—feel much greater than their length, exploring a lot of ideas and covering a lot of territory while recognizing a novel-length would be too much. There is a blissful restraint that works very well here.

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. Scars covers an age-old trope of human sacrifice for a community as well as enslavement and abuse of an innocent child for profit, while Cursed Bunny (one of the most sinister good times in the whole book) is a revenge tale against a corporate CEO for having used his position of power and privilege to destroy a struggling family. The final story, Reunion, best exemplifies a theme that is an undercurrent of many of these stories:

��The desperation and immense fear that your life, as well as the future to come, hinged on a moment. I could also understand how, in a situation where there was a single person who could kill you but also save you, all your survival instincts would be used towards satisfying that person.��

This is an excellent examination on how power thrives off of abuse, keeping those beneath you through fear and ensuring they remain subordinate to you by making anything other than complete submission an avenue for destruction, pain or death. In stories like Ruler of the Sands and Winds, power struggles and their consequences play out over generations, and we see an attempt to return to power done at the expense of the only innocent character in the story. She goes to great lengths to satisfy someone and is betrayed in the end for it, having merely been a pawn in the game. It’s a knockout of a story.

The Embodiment is another story that looks at power structures, this time as a sharp and horrifying critique of patriarchal structures. Much like a theme central to Japanese author Sayaka Murata, this story uses body horror to examine the notion that women must be wives and mothers in order to be socially acceptable as well as the cruel social stigmas against women who have children outside of marriage. Unsurprisingly, this is shown to be based in notions of power structures. Absurdism is alive in this deeply disturbing story that criticizes so many social aspects like masculinity, legacy and more and the ending is...well, you’ll see. And won’t forget it.

Trauma becomes a key aspect of these stories, with characters pushed to their limits or reacting to the world around them as informed by the horrors visited upon them. ��[T]hat was just what the world and its people were like,�� young characters growing up in bad situations think, and they carry these scars through life with them if they don’t learn to unpack and detangle their traumas.

��There’s a Japanese saying that goes, “Cursing others leads to two graves.�� Anyone who curses another person is sure to end up in a grave themselves.��

This highlights the consequences of enacting violence upon another but also demonstrates how living with revenge can harm those around you. It is a reminder that even if you have been wronged it is not a free card to wrong others, but this isn’t a simple ‘fix yourself and love more�� plea but an examination on how society refuses to allow space to do just that. Stories such as the extremely disturbing The Head show that we cannot run from our troubles or hide them away, and doing so only hurts us more in the long run. These stories show how our actions with one another shape the world and asks us what we are passing along to the future where trauma reverberates as ghosts such as in the final story.

If I’m being vague about these stories it is because they are best read with no idea what is coming. Each takes a surprising turn that is less a twist-ending and more a natural and well-earned sudden shift in perspective or revealed information that makes you feel like the floor has dropped out from under you. This book gave me chills several times as well as made me rather uncomfortable in ways that truly capture the power of a well-written story.

Cursed Bunny is a creepy good time with something for everyone if only you dare to enter Bora Chung’s nightmares. For those curious, her award winning story The Head can . These sharp social critiques and eerie stories are so well balanced and so much fun, I certainly will be thinking about them for a long time to come. Especially on dark and stormy nights��

4.5/5

��Had some giant trapped inside the cave of the night sky struck their chains against some unimaginably large wall to create the stars? Had they done it as a cry for help? Or to endure, somehow, the emptiness and the darkness?��