Cursed Bunny: Stories

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Billed as a weird collection of genre-bending short stories, the International Booker Prize shortlisted Cursed Bunny made waves in 2022 upon the release of its English translation. It received recognition for its bold, disturbing, and thought-provoking stories. Bora Chung undoubtedly has a vivid imagination. These stories cross many worlds and experiences, often with little to no context or explanation. For readers that can embrace that ambiguity, this will surely compel them. I am not such a reader.

I have been wanting to read Cursed Bunny ever since I heard that it was coming out. How I specifically had heard about this one was that Anton Hur was translating it, and I really like Anton Hur’s translations. After reading this book (and Happy Stories, Mostly) I can no longer say that I do not like short stories. There is clear proof that I can be fully swept of my feet by the right author. a bunch of my favorite subjects in one: ghosts, sadness, the meaning of life, people-watching, lovers. Scars” opens with the kidnapping of a nameless child, who is tossed into a cave. There he is ravaged by a bird-like monster that sinks its beak into his spine to feed, leaving behind hideous triangular scars. The boy grows up in the lightless void before managing to escape. But he’s immediately captured by an unscrupulous bald man who has him fight rabid dogs in an arena. From there … well, things don’t get any better. There are a couple of Grimm-like fables, Snare being a most disquieting effort about a fox that bleeds gold. Unfortunately, the longest story in the book Scars is also the most tedious one, an M. Night Shyamalan type thing about a boy sacrificed to a monster to save a village.

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An assorted collection of short stories by Bora Chung. The cover was enough reason for me to jump into it. Some really nice finds, some not. My toilet is no longer the safe place I once knew, and I’m never touching a bunny lamp no matter what. A great start with some really outstanding stories, the momentum gradually diminishing until by the end I was just eager to finish to move on. CHUNG: Well, when I was 28, I had an ovarian cyst, and my period wouldn't stop. And I went to see a gynecologist. Well, I told my mom, and the first thing my mom said was, you're not married. You're not going to go see a gynecologist by yourself. Cursed Bunny delivers strange and bizarre fables and, through these often grotesque fairy tales, articulates a clear critique of humanity. These are not childhood bedtime stories, but morality tales; sinners are punished. It is a collection that reminds us there are monsters everywhere, even in plain sight, even if we can’t see them.’

Bora Chung (BC): Cursed Bunny as a collection contains stories that I wrote in different periods of my life, under various circumstances. “The Head” was written for a school contest. And I wrote the title story, “Cursed Bunny,” as a part of a New Year’s project for the web magazine Mirror. We were planning to write about the Asian zodiac but other writers took the more glamorous animals such as the dragon, the tiger, the horse, etc., and all I had left was the bunny or the sheep. I don’t know anything about sheep so I chose the bunny.From an author never before published in the United States, Cursed Bunny is unique and imaginative, blending horror, sci-fi, fairy tales, and speculative fiction into stories that defy categorization. By turns thought-provoking and stomach-turning, here monsters take the shapes of furry woodland creatures and danger lurks in unexpected corners of everyday apartment buildings. But in this unforgettable collection, translated by the acclaimed Anton Hur, Chung’s absurd, haunting universe could be our own. Other stories read like a series of cautionary tales against capitalist greed: the title story tells of the slow, traumatic demise of a corporation’s CEO and his family after he is gifted a cursed object in revenge for his unsavoury business actions. And in ‘Snare’ the greed takes the form of the exploitation of natural resources: a down-and-out man finds a trapped fox that happens to bleed golden blood; he keeps the fox alive to sell its blood and begins to enjoy a life of riches with his new young family. But what follows is an unfolding of further gruesome events that lead to murder, cannibalism and incest. What do you call a nightmare you can’t wake up from? A living hell? WWB: Can the two of you talk about how Cursed Bunny came into the world—first, the germ of the original language, and then the translation.