Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Chung (Cursed Bunny) serves up a chilling novel-in-ghost-stories set within the eerie, echoing halls of a mysterious research institute that exists to both study cursed objects and keep them contained. At the institute, doors vanish, footsteps echo with no one there, and employees disappear as easily as memories. One night shift, worker Sook sets out to catalog the supernatural histories attached to various items and people in the facility, among them a handkerchief charged with the fury of sibling rivalry, a stolen sneaker seeking revenge, and a man so entirely unremarkable that it takes a while for Sook to notice how often he appears at random and blocks the way. Sook goes from room to room at the institute, each one opening into a discrete tale of horror, that ultimately come together to form a dark mirror reflecting deeper societal traumas, like animal testing, conversion therapy, domestic abuse, and the dehumanizing grind of late-stage capitalism. With a bone-dry wit and biting allegorical edge, expertly captured in Hur's translation, Chung turns the haunted-object trope into a vehicle for radical empathy and sharp critique. Part fable, part ghost story, and part social commentary, this is a beautiful and devastating excavation of how people make sense of the world's violence and tragedies. (Sept.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A worker at a research center for haunted objects tells a series of ghost stories to her underling. In Korean, the word to denote a senior colleague is "sunbae." In Chung's "novel in ghost stories," the first-person narrator--an employee at "the Institute," a place where researchers study supernatural items--relies on her sunbae not just for instructions on how to be a proper employee (turn off your phone at work; never look behind you) but for storytelling. The stories feature the employees and objects of the Institute, and images and dialogue loop and recur across the book. Often, an object appears in one story only to have its haunted origin revealed in a subsequent narrative. In "Cursed Sheep," for example, a paranormal content creator thinks getting a job at the Institute will skyrocket him to a massive following; instead, he suffers a hallucinatory trip through the building, dodging sheep in the stairwells and bugs underfoot that are not quite what they seem. In "Silence of the Sheep," the sunbae tells the story of the Institute's deputy director, who once worked as a fortune teller with the help of a prognosticating sheep who also serves as an experimental research subject at a local veterinary college. The recurrences and doublings contribute to the atmosphere of genuine dread, as do the narratives' structures, which are often stories within stories within stories. The labyrinthine construction mirrors the Institute itself, the shifting mystery at the center of the book. One of Chung's great strengths has always been social critique, and these tales cleverly examine the ways that vulnerable people--queer people, divorced women, the disabled, people saddled with debt--are society's "ghosts," who, rather than haunt others after death, must fight for justice and survival in the here and now. Inventive, layered, and deliciously weird. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
