October 17, 2022
Chung debuts with a well-crafted and horrifying collection of dark fairy tales, stark revenge fables, and disturbing body horror. In “The Head,” a woman is terrorized by a creature in her toilet. In “The Frozen Finger,” a woman awakes in the dark, unsure how her car got stuck in the mud, and follows a voice before learning of the danger it leads her to. In “Snare,” a fox bleeds gold and curses the merchant who keeps her captive; her curse is enacted horrifically through the merchant’s own children. “Scars” features a nameless boy who escapes endless tortures in a monster’s cave only to find pain and horror in the world of men. In “Goodbye, My Love,” a woman falls in love with an “artificial companion” but comes to a shocking realization when she attempts to replace the AI with a newer model. The strangely touching “Home Sweet Home” starts as a somewhat traditional story of a woman whose hard work is taken for granted by her ne’er-do-well husband, but their house holds a powerful secret that brings her happiness. Clever plot twists and sparkling prose abound. Chung’s work is captivating and terrifying.
June 1, 2021
Best-selling Korean author Chung is a genre-defying polyglot. She's a Yale MA-ed, Indiana University PhD-ed translator of Russian and Polish modern literature into Korean who writes an amalgam of speculative, ghostly, literary horror fiction. Her glorious anglophone debut, enabled by award-winning Anton Hur, is poised to shock and delight. Women in trouble populate the majority of Chung's strange tales, including "The Head," in which a lumpy talking head lives in the toilet, continuously forming itself from a woman's waste. "The Embodiment" is about an unfertilized pregnancy that sends the potential mother into a matchmaking frenzy. "The Frozen Finger" features a woman trapped in a sinking car. Betrayal looms in "Goodbye, My Love," which is about a woman and her three robots. In "Home Sweet Home," a couple buys a dilapidated building with a mysterious basement. "Ruler of the Winds and Sands" focuses on a na�ve princess and her blind prince. In "Reunion," a Korean woman and her Polish lover see ghosts. The fantastical dominates in "Snare 91," about a gold-bleeding fox and her greedy captor. "Scars," in which an orphan sacrificed to an unseen monster escapes to another tortuous existence, and the titular "Cursed Bunny" is about a family of cursed fetish makers and the three generations they destroy. Bizarrely enigmatic, Chung's collection proves irresistible.
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