This was my translated book for March 2023.

Excellent! Slow burn supernatural, ghosts, drama, and horror. Cursed Bunny is a collection of short stories that range from exceptionally weird (The Head) to haunting (Reunion).

The title story, Cursed Bunny, is a rift on the idea that family always comes back to haunt you in one way or another. You can change your circumstance, but you can't change your family. Ruler of The Winds and Sands is a gorgeous fairy tale with the same hideous underpinning. I loved the heroine of the story.

There were a few times that the translated text felt awkward in context, but overall it was perfectly fine reading in English. ( )

Definitely some messed up stuff here but a brilliant collection of stories from a writer I want to read more from. ( )

4.5 stars
v fun collection of stories that all have little twists and deeper meanings. each one was unique and interesting! i think snare was my fav one

characters: 3.5
plot: 5
writing: 4 ( )

I really, really enjoyed reading Cursed Bunny. The first story was a shock to begin with, but the stories after that had a sort of bittersweet, painfully elegant way about them. Each short story left me pondering for the moral and lesson of the story, and despite some of the stories being only around 20 pages long, I felt a deep connection to many of the characters. ( )

short stories - dark humor/horror stories from Korean author

these are some dark stories! They typically would not be something I'd pick up, except that this book is getting some good buzz (shortlisted for the International Booker, apparently) and I am trying to read more international authors. BUT--I am enjoying it anyway, despite myself, though the bizarreness of the Korean horror genre is still something I am not sure I can fully embrace.

Very readable, very dark, and yes there will be blood--and menses--not to mention some poop. ( )

Cursed Bunny is a collection of surreal, horrific short stories by Korean author Bora Chung with a theme of mother and womanhood. I like it, it reminds me of Her Body and Other Parties which is a similarly surreal and horrific collection of short stories with the theme of womanhood. ( )

Wow. Just wow. An amazing collection of writing - I loved them all but the last one, that is the one that was a knockout punch to the gut. Warning- not for the faint of heart and probably don't read these while eating lunch (especially the first one). ( )

Must be really good because it’s fiction I don’t like but I read through all the stories enthralled. ( )

I have mixed feelings about this short story collection. Some of the stories I will definitely remember due to their strangeness/grossness, but I can't say that they really did much for me. I'm just kinda over body horror and allegorical tales in general. I'm also disappointed this made the International Booker Prize shortlist over "More Than I Love My Life," but there's just no accounting for taste. ( )

Ploughing my way through this got me thinking about the LibraryThing rating system: is it time for an overhaul?
    From several other reviewers here I learned that Cursed Bunny was shortlisted for a Booker prize, so was expecting something well-written at least. Instead, this is a collection of ten short stories which got off on the wrong foot right from the start: in the first, “The Head”, a human head appears in a woman’s toilet bowl; she flushes it away, but it keeps reappearing and calls her “Mother”. Not as interesting as it sounds I’m afraid—or original either: there’s a much better story which begins uncannily like this in a collection of Finnish short stories from 2013 called It Came From the North. Next up is “The Embodiment” in which Kim Young-lan finds she’s pregnant without any male involvement (wretched effort, but at least I learned what a “seon” is: a match-making blind-date aimed at marriage, which follows specific rituals and rules, in Korea). In number three, the title-story, a curse destroys a drinks business (but uninterestingly)…and so on, for a further seven.
    The writing is poor and the stories tedious. With the writing, I suppose it could be the translation (Anton Hur is a Swede, translating from Korean into English); several other reviewers think not but, honestly, some of the phrasing is so clunky I think it must be at least partly that. As for the content, almost none of the publisher’s blurb is true: this describes Cursed Bunny as a mixture of horror (no it isn’t), magical realism (nope) and science fiction (perhaps they were joking). It also uses words such as “fantastic” and “surreal” (surreal? Really?)
    Or was it me? Was I just in a grumpy mood while reading it maybe? That’s what got me thinking about our ratings system: should it be extended to reflect the state of mind of the reviewer? How about a second set of stars—brown ones, say, from one to five—alongside the white ones and which mean, “I was feeling like shit when I read this”, or “We’d just had a blazing row”, or even, “It was my birthday and I was completely off my face while writing this review”? ( )

Horror Fairy Tales
Review of the Honford Star (UK) paperback (July 2021) translated by Anton Hur from the Korean language original 저주토끼 (March 2017)

[3.6 average from the 10 separate ratings, rounded up to 4]
I'll confess here that after the first two stories I put the book aside and debated whether to even go back to it. Several weeks later I did and I actually found that I did enjoy most of the rest of the book, which is often along the lines of folk tales or fantasy quests. So if you are uncertain about the beginning, perhaps give the later stories a try and you may find you end up enjoying them.

See cover at https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/518TzvCosEL._SX318_BO1,204,203,...
Cover image of the North American edition to be published by Algonquin Books December 6, 2022. Image sourced from Amazon.

1. The Head * Surreal horror of a talking head constituting itself from the leavings of excrement and discards in a toilet.
2. The Embodiment * After treatment for a long-running menstrual bleed, a woman becomes pregnant from the stress.
3. Cursed Bunny **** A family of sorcerers curses another family in revenge by means of a rabbit effigy.
4. The Frozen Finger **** A woman is in an apparent traffic accident and is coaxed out of the smashed car by a voice.
5. Snare ***** A man rescues a wounded fox from a snare when he discovers it bleeds gold.
6. Goodbye, My Love ****. A man has trouble keeping his AI robots under control.
7. Scars ***** A young boy is sacrificed to a vampiric cave monster but escapes from it for years of further imprisonment as a cage fighter.
8. Home Sweet Home **** A building bought as an investment appears to be cursed.
9. Ruler of the Winds and Sands ***** A princess goes on a quest to remove a curse from the prince whom she is to wed.
10. Reunion *** A traveler in a Polish town sees ghostly apparitions.

Trivia and Links
Story No. 1 The Head can be read at Samovar magazine online here from September 2019.

Cursed Bunny was long and shortlisted for the 2022 International Book Prize and you can read about the author and the translator and obtain a reading guide at its Booker webpage here. ( )

Absolutely one of my best reads this year :0 The book started with lots of magical realism. It's like Budi Darma but with more angst. The first one was already a punch in the gut, and then it got better and better. Chung carefully added horror, folk-lore, sci-fi, and fantasy to the mix and nailed every single one. Gdi she's so talented it's almost a cheat. My favorites are The Embodiment and Scars, but every piece was stellar. With engaging story telling, simple writing, great pacing, heart wrenching twists and open endings, her short stories are complete circles that leave you squirming and breathless, simultaneously needing a timeout and wanting for more. Ms. Bora Chung, you got a fan in me. ( )