Cursed Bunny sees Bora Chung employ and then amplify absurdly horrific levels of familiar tropes found in horror. For example, women’s fears and concerns have been ignored since the dawn of the genre, and the protagonists of Chung’s stories fare no better. In The Head, a woman is advised to simply ignore the sentient severed head found living in her toilet bowl. Healthcare professionals criticise and dismiss Young-lan in The Embodiment when she experiences side effects from birth control pills. In both instances, these women are expected either to ignore their problems or to deal with them alone. Chung further takes the expectations placed on women – to find a husband, to have children, to run a household – and observes them through an uncanny lens.

Godammnit! I liked this one. It's about greed and how everything has a price. I was gasping at the twists in this short story. An assorted collection of short stories by Bora Chung. The cover was enough reason for me to jump into it. Some really nice finds, some not. My toilet is no longer the safe place I once knew, and I’m never touching a bunny lamp no matter what. A great start with some really outstanding stories, the momentum gradually diminishing until by the end I was just eager to finish to move on.

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Most of the male characters in these stories hunger for power but are unable to stop it from corrupting them. Most of the female characters suffer, lose agency and are powerless in the face of patriarchal greed and control. 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.

Surreal and grotesque, with gestures towards supernatural, fabular and weird fiction, this is a mixed bag of stories. The first half of the collection was better for me (The Head, The Embodiment, Cursed Bunny, The Frozen Finger, Snare) then there's a transitional AI/speculative fiction entry with Goodbye My Love that feels over-familiar even to me and I rarely read in that genre but it's similar to Machines Like Me, Klara and the Sun, Little Eyes. The final four longer tales just didn't really work for me and feel like Chung is trying things out without the assurance of voice and vision that characterises the early stories.

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So, my question like Duchamp's question when he placed a urinal, a piece of plumbing in an art gallery in New York, and called it "Fountain" - is it art? My favourite really had to be "The Head" in which a woman is tortured by a creature that keeps emerging in her toilet bowl in this mildly offensive story. The story is a surreally humorous yet oddly upsetting tale that it was a brilliant piece for putting the wind up with that opening. It was just witless and aghasting, especially as a frequent user of a toilet. The stories then moved towards heavier, somewhat sadder dark fantasy territory. I am not a great fan of fantasy or fairy tales and that was prevalent in the longer writings of “Ruler of the Winds and Sands”, “Snare” or “Scars” which can teach much about the exploitative nature of humans. There’s even some good science fiction hidden in the scary folds of AI brains. 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: I mustered my courage to dive into Bora Chung's collection thanks to Alan's unmissable and motivating review with succinct, informative and spoiler-free descriptions of every single short story in Cursed Bunny. I have the feeling my four-star rating for this book may be a bit overgenerous but I wanted to celebrate its uniqueness, the author's artistry at the grotesque, surrealist imagery and quirky humour evident even in the title of the collection.

The first Korean speculative fiction to be longlisted for the Booker Prize, Cursed Bunny was first published by a tiny independent Korean publisher specializing in SF and then the English translation was published by a tiny independent British publisher and I am so very proud of Arzak and Honford Star. And I am eternally grateful to Anton Hur for all his efforts and achievements. It is published by Honford Star whose mission is to publish the best literature from East Asia, be it classic or contemporary ... By working with talented translators and exciting local artists, we hope to see more bookshelves containing beautiful editions of the East Asian literature we love. In 2022, the English edition of her short story collection Cursed Bunny translated by Anton Hur was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. [2] The ten stories borrow from different genres, including magical realism, horror and science fiction. [1] [4] In September 2023 the book was longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. [6] One of the things I liked most was the genre-bending aspect of the short stories in Cursed Bunny. For instance, Goodbye my love has some elements of science fiction, Scars of fantasy, Reunion of a ghost and love story, Snare of a myth or fairytale. Interestingly, Bora Chung's stories showcase even level which is not often the case in collections. As for my personal preferences, the closer to magical realism or fantasy and farther from typical horror, the better. The two stories which I liked the best are Scars and Ruler of the Winds and Sands. There was a big potential in Snare also but it turned out too dark for my liking. Oddly, the title story, Cursed Bunny, appealed to me the least. An added bonus for me: Reunion is set in an unnamed city in Poland which resembles Cracow and there are even some sentences in Polish. The idea of women not being fully in control of their bodies is repeated in other stories too, particular in The Embodiment, in which a young woman is surprised to find herself pregnant after using too much birth control, and is then continuously told by health care providers that the baby will not be ‘a normal child’ unless she finds a father for it. The story is also a comment on single motherhood and the constant societal pressure and judgment women face when it comes to their bodies, and their personal choices, and the grief of losing yourself in the midst of these pressures.

If the aesthetics of the book are the only thing of quality, think again; Cursed Bunny, is without any doubt, THE best short story collection I have read in a long time. South Korea’s Bora Chung’s short stories are brimming with horror, fairy tale elements and great doses of weirdness. This is a world where heads emerge from toilets, orphans acquire unknown superpowers, rabbits cause financial ruin and foxes bleed gold.