Cursed Bunny: Shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize

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More importantly, however, a panel of judges have taken their time to evaluate and consider this book seriously, for presumably, its literary and artistic merits. Cursed Bunny is a creepy good time with something for everyone if only you dare to enter Bora Chung’s nightmares. I personally don’t like forcing people to read books but I will break that rule – do invest in these stories. Blurring the lines between magical realism, horror, and science-fiction, Chung uses elements of the fantastic and surreal to address the very real horrors and cruelties of patriarchy and capitalism in modern society.

This is a world where heads emerge from toilets, orphans acquire unknown superpowers, rabbits cause financial ruin and foxes bleed gold. My favourite really had to be "The Head" in which a woman is tortured by a creature that keeps emerging in her toilet bowl in this mildly offensive story. I fully acknowledge this was a personal issue with the writing, but nevertheless it took away from my reading experience.

These ten stories by South Korean author Bora Chung started off with somewhat lighter, surreal, yet meaningful horror - the opening stories were just breathtaking: “The Head”, the story of a woman whose remains of all sorts, hair, skin, nails, feces assemble to form a new being; “The Embodiment”, in which a woman falls pregnant mysteriously to an even more mysterious “child”; and the titular “Cursed Bunny” in which karma finds its place through cursed objects. The Embodiment is another story that looks at power structures, this time as a sharp and horrifying critique of patriarchal structures. Each entry in this collection is a fully realized story unto itself, showing Chung’s mastery of the form as her work shocks and horrifies and lodges viscerally in one’s memory. Trauma becomes a key aspect of these stories, with characters pushed to their limits or reacting to the world around them as informed by the horrors visited upon them.

I can't bring myself to give it 1 star, because I did like the last story and I can see what Chung was trying to do with this, it just really didn't work for me. Many of these stories will appeal to those who enjoy moral tales and a strange cocktail of horror-science fiction-magical realism.I enjoyed reading it and would recommend it, but for me it was a little uneven, and though some of the stories are powerful and moving, others are rather difficult to comprehend.