August 5, 2024
South Korea is rotten to the core in this disturbing short story collection from Shirley Jackson Award winner Pyun (The Law of Lines). Each of the eight tales teems with images of decay and neglect, including maggots feasting on a bloated corpse and emaciated, constantly barking canines. It’s a dog-eat-dog world for Pyun’s human characters, too, including the protagonist of “Night Work,” who ekes out a living by day as the watchman for the ancient tombs beneath his village, then spends nights shoring up his family home against an onslaught of insects, rodents, and feral cats. Other motifs include headaches and highways. Both appear in the opener, “The Trip,” which finds an ill-matched couple setting off for a weekend getaway that turns into a marathon trek through unrelenting fog: “If not for the taillights of the car ahead, she would have believed they were driving through hell.” While Pyun delivers some delightful turns of phrase and absurdist humor (as in “Parade,” in which six stampeding elephants escape from a third-rate amusement park), the unrelenting grimness of these stories grows wearying fast. Even strong-stomached readers may be exhausted by this queasy house of horrors.
Starred review from September 1, 2024
People in pairs, families, and offices might share spaces, but they remain notably detached in Pyun's exquisitely intricate, occasionally surreal stories. The word "alone" appears more than a dozen times, underscoring a sense of disconnected isolation. A couple's weekend away quickly turns antagonistic without their ever reaching the sought-after destination. A contentious couple attempts to staunch their home's pest-infested decay with illicit renovations by night, leading to fatal results. An office worker is pressured by a superior to take on a dubious extra project, only to lose his bag containing the desperately sourced results. A city-to-village relocated family faces eviction in the title story. Six elephants desert their humans and run for the mountains, and a Siberian wolf escapes in "Birth of the Zoo," setting off a frenzy of urban hunters. "Commemoration" features a delivery man who longs for a sustained conversation with the woman to whom he's been bringing packages for years. Pyun suggests a glimmer of hope in a tale about three strangers living in the same apartment building who randomly fall into a weekly poker night. Lauded Kim-Russell and author-academic Fenkl (both, interestingly, biracial Korean Americans) each translates four stories. Despite the mostly Korean settings, Pyun resonantly captures the universal, ubiquitous malaise of aloneness.
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