CURSED BUNNY BY BORA CHUNG, TRANSLATED BY ANTON HUR, 2021 (BOOK REVIEW BY JONATHAN THORNTON)
28/7/2021
“Grandfather used to say, “When we make our cursed fetishes, it’s important that they’re pretty.”" CURSED BUNNY BY BORA CHUNG, TRANSLATED BY ANTON HUR, 2021 (BOOK REVIEW BY JONATHAN THORNTON)Cursed Bunny is Korean author Bora Chung’s first book to be translated into English. Over the course of the ten short stories included in this book, Chung effortlessly mixes elements of horror and fantasy, science fiction and surrealism, to create a fresh and unique take on Weird fiction. Frequently focusing on the perspectives of women, Chung’s stories use the Weird to paint the horrors of living in a patriarchal, late-period capitalist society in lurid and disturbing detail. The stories are not relentlessly grim though. Chung’s understanding of the ghastliness of modern existence is married to a wry, sardonic humour which helps to make these stories so striking and unforgettable. Publishers Honford Star have done another fantastic job with this collection. The stories are wonderfully translated by Anton Hur, who ensures that the English versions retain Chung’s sharp wit and vivid prose, and the striking cover art by Jaehoon Choi is a good indicator of the mind-twisting, psychedelic delights contained within. As a reader excited about advances in the Weird, I can only hope that more of Chung’s work becomes available to read in English soon. Cursed Bunny opens with ‘The Head’, Chung’s first published short story which won the 1998 Yonsei Literature Prize and immediately sets out Chung’s aesthetic stall. The story is a surreally humorous yet oddly upsetting tale of a woman who is plagued by a head made out of all the shit, piss and blood collected in her toilet. The story is funny, but all the more effective because Chung plays the bonkers premise entirely straight. What could have been just a goofy gross out story becomes a thoughtful meditation on the abject and our attitude towards it, effectively making the reader consider when the ageing body itself becomes abject in our youth-fixated culture. Chung’s exploration of the messiness of bodies recurs throughout her stories, but particularly in ‘The Embodiment’, in which periods and pre-marital pregnancy shift from being a societal site of shame to being visceral body horror for the unfortunate protagonist, and ‘Frozen Finger’, in which a woman dying in a car accident is led through a nightmare world of darkness and sludge by a malevolent spirit. A reader may assume that they have the measure of Chung as a writer from these thematically linked opening stories, but then the collection leads the reader on a series of strange and disorienting turns, showing the full range of Chung’s creative voice. The title story ‘Cursed Bunny’ is a good example of how Chung uses absurdist humour to accentuate her horror. Telling the story of a family who professionally create cursed fetish objects in a small town, the narrative takes in the unthinking brutality of corporate greed, generational revenge and the price of one’s soul to build a chilling, multi-layered ghost story. Like the grandfather who narrates much of the story, Chung manages to imbue a kitsch lamp in the shape of a bunny with real horror. ‘Home Sweet Home’ is an almost realist exploration of wage slavery and crushing debt, in which the female protagonist is trapped in debt by her irresponsible cheating husband, in which the supernatural element forms a dark undercurrent but also a means of escape. ‘Reunion’ is a lyrical ghost story that explores the generational trauma of war, in which the children of those who survived the war are the recipients of the pent up anxieties, fears and horrors experienced by their parents. ‘Goodbye, My Love’ is a science fictional exploration of loneliness and disposability culture, in which a brilliant engineer’s robot creations rebel against being replaced with newer models. These stories engage in powerful and moving ways with the anxieties of our present day, with a visceral power available only to horror and the Weird. Other of Chung’s stories are more like darkly twisted fairy tales. She is particularly well suited to this medium, as these stories make good use of her strange characters, lyrical writing and knack for vivid and surreal imagery. ‘Snare’ is a sadistic variation on the goose who laid the golden egg, telling the story of a farmer who discovers a fox trapped in a snare who bleeds gold. From the familiar beginning, the story spirals out into a visceral and bloody tale of abuse that draws on folk tales and vampire mythology. ‘Ruler Of The Winds And Sands’ tells the story of a princess who marries a prince cursed with blindness and sets out to cure him, but completely subverts the fairy tale motif of the just and good royals by revealing them to be vicious warmongers. The story is full of beautiful dreamlike imagery, from giant fish buried in the desert to the beautiful ship made of golden gears. ‘Scars’, the longest story in the collection, is perhaps the most powerful and disturbing of Chung’s reworkings of fairytale motifs. Working on the motif of the child sacrificed to the monster to ensure the safety of the whole village, Chung uses the story to meditate on monstrousness, othering and the people that society excludes. Throughout the story, the protagonist faces various horrors and abuses, first at the hand of the monster, then at a society that hates and fears him for the moral complicity that he represents. In keeping with Chung’s dark worldview, it is perhaps appropriate that in order to win his own freedom, the character must destroy not just the monster but the society that cast him out in the first place. Chung’s Cursed Bunny heralds a bold new voice in dark fiction, one that English-reading afficionados of horror and the Weird will be excited to welcome into the fold. Full of striking imagery and dark humour, the stories make an excellent case for how horror and the Weird help us understand the alienation of the world around us. I very much look forward to more of Chung’s work being brought into publication in English; on the strength of this collection we have been missing out on a masterful voice in horror for too long. Cursed Bunny |
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