I’m going to be honest: I went into Chung Bora’s Cursed Bunny expecting to be underwhelmed. I do like my fair share of “literary” speculative fiction, as well as my fair share of “literary fiction” in general, but I am as a rule not terribly enthusiastic about the kind of speculative texts that would end up on the Booker Prize shortlist — I was expecting mainly liminal fantasies and maybe some light near-future sci-fi (in fact, despite the blurb on my copy putting “sci-fi” ahead of “fairy tales,” there’s only one unequivocally science fiction story in the collection). I am very pleased to say I was wrong — the entire collection is made up of stories I would be comfortable recommending to habitual fantasy and science fiction readers, and they’re all very good.
(reading between the lines in the blurb I should have pieced together that the reason the collection is framed the way it is is because the publisher was attempting to market what are, ultimately, fantasy, science fiction, and horror stories to literary fiction readers. that doesn’t explain the perplexing distinction the blurb implies between “sci-fi” and “speculative fiction.” the New Wave sense of “Literary science fiction” clearly overlaps with sci-fi; the genre-blurring sense clearly overlaps with sci-fi; and the contemporary use of the term as an umbrella encompassing fantasy, science fiction, and certain kinds of horror contains sci-fi. very odd.)
anyway. I would say the predominant theoretical concern here is the relationships between gender, power, and the body. this is maybe most obvious in the two body horror stories that open the collection (especially “The Embodiment,” a pregnancy horror story), but it runs throughout the collection: the ways revenge is enacted in “Cursed Bunny,” the gaslighting in “The Frozen Finger,” the extremely dark exploration of abuse and incest in “Snare,” the meditation on control and bodies in “Goodbye, My Love,” the murderous attrition around the protagonist of “Home Sweet Home,” the examination of trauma in “Reunion.” I think if I were to pick a single favorite story in the collection it would be “Scars,” which is also the longest story. it follows a nameless boy (later young man) who escapes his imprisonment first by an inhuman monster that has transformed his body, then by a human monster who forces him to participate in gladiatorial combat, and then by the history set in motion by the human monsters who sacrificed an orphan child to the inhuman monster. it’s gorgeous and fucked-up and, in spite of this, strangely hopeful — its destructive climax is also a catharsis, opening a way forward even as it leaves history in ruins. few of Chung’s protagonists have names, which feels related.
I would love to teach basically every story in the collection (though I must admit that the opening two body horror stories, “The Head” and “The Embodiment,” moved me somewhat less than some of the later stories). while science fiction readers don’t get as much to work with here — only “Goodbye, My Love,” a story about androids, possession, disposability, and love — there’s something for readers of most kinds of fantasy, as long as they like dark stuff. it’s skewed, perhaps, towards the liminal or intrusion, but there are fairy tales (“Snare” and “Ruler of the Wind and Sands”), things that feel a bit like high fantasy (“Scars” and “Ruler of the Wind and Sands”), a kind of urban fantasy (“Home Sweet Home”), ghost stories (“Cursed Bunny,” “The Frozen Finger,” “Home Sweet Home”), ...
my biggest complaint about the collection is honestly just that the Algonquin Books edition that I have has absolutely horrendous page design and dubious typesetting. firstly, the bottom margin is approximately 2 inches. hello??? second of all, the printing in this copy is bad — position of the text on the page varies by as much as a full line from page to page; it’s just poor quality. third of all, even if the printing is uncontrollable, the number of lines of text per page varies — some pages have 28 lines and some have 29, for no reason I can discern. it just looks amateurish overall.
excellent book.
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