Cursed Bunny: Stories

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Billed as a weird collection of genre-bending short stories, the International Booker Prize shortlisted Cursed Bunny made waves in 2022 upon the release of its English translation. It received recognition for its bold, disturbing, and thought-provoking stories. Bora Chung undoubtedly has a vivid imagination. These stories cross many worlds and experiences, often with little to no context or explanation. For readers that can embrace that ambiguity, this will surely compel them. I am not such a reader. South Korean novelist Bora Chung’s first translated work, the short story collection Cursed Bunny is an example of the new amalgamated norm. Drawing from Korean folk tale and Chung’s expertise as a Slavic literature professor, the narratives here shamble and ooze across a porous divide between highbrow absurdism and lowbrow jump scare. The balance changes from story to story, and sometimes the genre conventions feel too pat, as genre conventions will. But the more predictable moments set you up to miss a crucial step and fall right into the abyss when Chung gets weird.’ BC: Cursed Bunny was our first collaboration. Afterwards Anton tried really hard to promote me, and it worked. He published “The Head” in the online magazine Samovar and published another short story entitled “The Mask” in Valancourt Book of Horror, Vol. II. It was fun.

Contents The Head The Embodiment Cursed Bunny The Frozen Finger Snare Goodbye, My Love Scars Home Sweet Home Ruler of the Winds and Sands Reunion 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 be read here. 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…CHUNG: I have no idea. I never imagined my book would reach anywhere outside Korea. So this is all very unreal to me. I feel like I'm in the middle of my own story, and my own stories don't really have a happy ending, so I'm probably in trouble. I don't know. Okay, allllllllright. This one had potential. It is eerie, atmospheric, and unsettling. Confusing though. But I actually really enjoyed it........dammnit. There are a couple of Grimm-like fables, Snare being a most disquieting effort about a fox that bleeds gold. Unfortunately, the longest story in the book Scars is also the most tedious one, an M. Night Shyamalan type thing about a boy sacrificed to a monster to save a village. 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: Five authors of Korean thrillers you should be reading: You-Jeong Jeong, Un-Su Kim, Young-Ha Kim, J.M. Lee and Hye-Young Pyun

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.

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CHUNG: Well, when I was 28, I had an ovarian cyst, and my period wouldn't stop. And I went to see a gynecologist. Well, I told my mom, and the first thing my mom said was, you're not married. You're not going to go see a gynecologist by yourself. i am a weak person, but...i am physically incapable of having any opinions on this story beyond how disgusting it is. Other stories read like a series of cautionary tales against capitalist greed: the title story tells of the slow, traumatic demise of a corporation’s CEO and his family after he is gifted a cursed object in revenge for his unsavoury business actions. And in ‘Snare’ the greed takes the form of the exploitation of natural resources: a down-and-out man finds a trapped fox that happens to bleed golden blood; he keeps the fox alive to sell its blood and begins to enjoy a life of riches with his new young family. But what follows is an unfolding of further gruesome events that lead to murder, cannibalism and incest. What do you call a nightmare you can’t wake up from? A living hell? BC:I trust Anton completely, and I leave him alone when he works. The result is always brilliant, as you can see. In “Goodbye My Love,” Anton gave Model One a gender because the English language requires it. So Anton made Model One a she. Model one is a robot, so by principle it doesn’t have gender and Model One as a woman kind of surprised me. It gave the story an undertone of a queer narrative, and I love it.