The head follows the woman wherever she goes through the sewer system, manifesting whenever she uses a toilet. Two slits for eyes.” The repulsive-looking head is the product of feces and clumps of hair. The head is a haunted image, resembling “a lump of carelessly slapped-together yellow and grey clay, with a few scattered clumps of wet hair. The head explains how it came to be from the woman’s discarded waste. In “The Head,” the first story of the collection, a woman is haunted by a floating head who lives in her toilet. There are other critiques, too, of misogyny, capitalism, and even modernity through these often shocking and unexpected narratives featuring assorted monsters, both literal and metaphorical. The stories follow a pattern: a series of horrors befalls the protagonists, often disasters of their own making. The underlying message serves as a warning. The collection moralizes greed and other carnal sins. They range from horror to fantasy to slightly supernatural, with the individual stories varying in how they integrate a mix of those elements into modern fables and parables. The stories defy conventional categorization. The monsters in Bora Chung’s story collection, Cursed Bunny, translated by Anton Hur, are sometimes less obvious, but not less terrifying. Grotesque monsters often serve as villains in children’s fairy tales.
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