It’s her indifference that seals her fate, because when the head grows into a full-fledged human body, it talks back to her and says that because she never treated it properly, it’s time for them to switch lives. It calls her mother, asks for more in life, but she callously flushes it down the toilet. The very first story is about a head appearing in a woman’s toilet, and she treats it with blatant disregard. Chung’s prose is like a knife, something that is very precise and clearly carefully deliberated upon when choosing its themes and subjects. There are big kernels of truth to the reality we live in inside of the stories, so it’s not like it’s trying to be this way on purpose. I’m going to focus in and pinpoint the stories I found most interesting and had values I could take away with, so let us delve a bit deeper, shall we?

Now there are ten stories in this collection, but I’m not going to discuss all of them in this review-that’s something for another time. There are exactly ten stories in this collection, and I found a good chunk of them to be absolutely riveting, albeit outside of my comfort zone of what I’m used to reading. You are going to find surrealism, horror, magic/fantasy, and science fiction all within the 256 pages these stories occupy, so you need to be ready to buckle in and take a journey on what it means to strictly not be defined by a single genre. With that being said, let’s dive right into this short story collection, shall we?Ĭursed Bunny is a collection of short stories inspired by Russian and Slavic fairytales, blending magic and horror to teach some critical lessons.Īs written above, Cursed Bunny is not a cohesive novel, it’s a series of short stories that blend genre. That’s my warning going into this: you’re going to find some content in this book that may make you a little nauseous, so if you’re someone not into the grotesque, this isn’t the book for you at all. That’s the mood that would capture the vibe of the short stories perfectly, as they’re like horrific little fairytales that can really make you squeamish. What also drew me into this book specifically was the cover: it screams danger and as if something were to leap out of you from some surreal dreamscape. These Slavic influences are ripe within Cursed Bunny, but more on that later. I’d never read any of Chung’s works specifically, but I knew of her she’s a big figure in Korean literature right now, and she got her PhD in Slavic Literature. Korean literature can be tricky to get right, so the need for a good translator is high here. How I specifically had heard about this one was that Anton Hur was translating it, and I really like Anton Hur’s translations.

I have been wanting to read Cursed Bunny ever since I heard that it was coming out.

Cursed bunny book