As in (the less interesting versions of) genre, you know what’s coming.īooks Review: What a queer Taiwanese 1995 sci-fi novel got right about the futureĬhi Tai-we’s ‘The Membranes,’ finally out in English, is dated as sci-fi, but its mind-bending narrative was a prescient exploration of identity. Rather than disorienting you, the last-minute flip of narrative reality becomes so expected it’s almost comforting. Chung uses that trick in half of the 10 selections here - enough that it ceases to be a shock and starts feeling like an irritant or a cop-out. She’s especially fond of an EC Comics/”Sixth Sense” style twist, in which you learn that an important character is dead, or a ghost, or unreal. Over the course of the collection, Chung dabbles in science fiction, fantasy, fable and horror. But the more predictable moments set you up to miss a crucial step and fall right into the abyss when Chung gets weird. The balance changes from story to story, and sometimes the genre conventions feel too pat, as genre conventions will.

Drawing from Korean folk tale and Chung’s expertise as a Slavic literature professor, the narratives here shamble and ooze across a porous divide between highbrow absurdism and lowbrow jump scare.

South Korean novelist Bora Chung’s first translated work, the short story collection “ Cursed Bunny,” is an example of the new amalgamated norm. Over the last couple of decades, literary fiction has increasingly unhinged its jaws to gulp down genre fiction, creating new, lumpy hybrids - Stephen Graham Jones’ bloodily stitched together literary slashers Susanna Clarke’s magic potion of epic fantasy and realism Kate Atkinson’s sliding doors of historical fiction and time travel. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.

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