She seems to derive comfort by painting small, unsettling interiors. As a matter of fact, Chung doesn’t care for closures that veer towards relief.

The monster, which is referred to as “It”, would “insert a sharp, hard thing into the boy’s vertebrae and suck”. The injuries that the guy inflicts on the fox find a beastly reflection in Scars where a boy gets injured by a monster. He’s not a fool he knows how to play this game well. He won’t get the gold - and the riches it brings - if the fox dies, though. The man, naturally, gets greedy and comes up with an awful plan in order to keep the animal bleeding. Chung, again, fills Snare with an air of terror, in which a man finds out that a fox, he chances upon in a forest, bleeds gold. If there’s another story that has the same verve as this one, it is Snare. The Head leans on the tropes of science fiction without borrowing the genre’s tools outrightly and emerges as the clear winner in the collection. However, as the head begins to have conversations with the protagonist, eccentricity makes way for believability. It’s a bizarre image that doesn’t quite make sense at first. The entire story doesn’t take place within the walls of the bathroom obviously, but the “head” doesn’t live anywhere else. In the opening story, named The Head, the protagonist encounters a talking head in the toilet.

Although they are both disturbing on the outside, they open up our minds to several different worlds at once. If I have to slot Cursed Bunny into a particular category, I would gladly place it next to Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (2007). And the one quality that I admired the most about the collection is that it gets weirder and weirder with every turn of the page. A typical horror story in Chung’s hands is as brutal as a slasher movie, but there’s also a touch of sadness to it. The short stories in this collection hop from one genre to another as though they are theme park rides. Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize last year, is funny, startling, moving, and original.

Cursed bunny reviews