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. There is a blissful restraint that works very well here. 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.

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. Bora Chung deftly moves from haunted house stories ( Home Sweet Home) to surreal thrillers ( The Frozen Finger) to even a story about uncanny valley 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). 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). 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. ‘ I feel like I’m being given permission to stay alive.’

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