Why this book

Published in Korea in 2017 and carried to the world by translator Anton Hur, it reached the International Booker shortlist in 2022. Critics struggled to name its genre — horror, fable, science fiction, folktale — because Bora Chung refuses to sit inside any single one.

The Story

The collection's title story begins with an old man and his grandchild by lamplight. For generations, he explains, their family has practiced a strange trade: they craft cursed fetishes, beautiful objects built to ruin whoever comes to own them. But the family binds itself to one iron rule.

In the old man's workshop sit rows of finished curses — a mirror, a comb, a music box — each lovely, each waiting. He tells the child that a true fetish must be made with total devotion, for hatred alone is clumsy; only care makes a curse that never fails.

Then the old man speaks of his dearest friend, a gentle man whose family had brewed fine liquor for a hundred years. Their small brewery was honest and beloved across the region. But its very success drew the envy of a larger, colder rival.

The two men had grown up together, the old man says, sharing wine and secrets since boyhood. Therefore his friend's brewery felt like his own — a warm, lamplit place of laughter, where the whole village gathered and no one was ever turned away thirsty.

The rival could never win on the quality of its liquor. Therefore it chose poison of a different kind — rumors. It whispered everywhere that the friend's liquor was tainted, that loyal drinkers had sickened and even died from a single cup.

The lies spread faster than any truth could chase them, and customers vanished overnight. But the rival went further still, buying the courts and the newspapers, until the friend's family was branded as murderers before the whole country.

The gentle brewer stood before the courts and swore his liquor was pure, offering to drink a full barrel himself to prove it. But the rival's money had already spoken louder, therefore the judges turned away, and the crowd that once loved him now spat at his name.

Therefore their brewery was seized, their good name destroyed, and their fortune stripped away to nothing. One by one the family died — some of illness, some of grief, some by their own despairing hands — until only the friend himself remained.

The dying friend came to the grandfather at the end, hollow and ruined, and begged for the justice no court on earth would give him. Therefore the grandfather agreed, for the first time in his life, to build a curse for someone he loved.

He chose the gentlest shape he could imagine — a bunny, soft and harmless, made into a lamp that glowed with warm and comforting light. But into that glow he wove every drop of his friend's grief, so the sweeter it looked, the deadlier it became.

The lamp arrived as an anonymous gift at the mansion of the rival company's proud old head. Charmed by the pretty thing, he set the bunny on the desk in his private study, never once suspecting the ruin curled quietly inside its light.

For a while, nothing happened at all. But soon the old man began to glimpse bunnies where none could possibly be — hopping across his desk, multiplying in the corners of his vast, silent house. Ashamed, he told no one, therefore the terror grew alone inside him.

The proud old head stopped receiving guests, snapping at shadows, his fine clothes hanging loose on a shrinking frame. His family thought him merely aged and strange. But he alone knew the truth: the bunnies were always watching, and they were slowly, patiently multiplying.

One night the old man woke to find the bunnies swarming his bed, their red eyes glinting, their soft bodies warm against his skin. He struck at them, but his hands passed through empty air. Therefore he understood, too late, that the curse lived inside him now.

The phantom bunnies gnawed through his ledgers and quietly ate his fortune. Worse, a bottomless thirst took hold of him that no water could ever slake. Therefore he drank, and drank, the very liquor his company made, until wine was the only thing that passed his lips.

But the curse did not stop with the old man. His son inherited the same unquenchable thirst, therefore drinking himself hollow in turn, and his grandchildren were born wrong — pale, wasting children who craved only wine, who could hold down no food at all.

The son died first, his belly swollen with drink, whispering of white bunnies as the light left his eyes. But the family buried the truth with him, calling it mere illness, therefore never guessing that the pretty lamp in the study was the true and patient cause.

Remember the family rule: a curse takes only the guilty and those of their blood. Therefore this one hunted the entire family line that had grown rich on murder, feeding upon them generation after generation, as patient and thorough as slow rot.

The great mansion slowly emptied. The servants fled the endless scratching inside the walls, and the family's mighty wealth crumbled into ruin and debt. But the little bunny lamp only glowed brighter and warmer, as though fattening on everything it had consumed.

At last only a single heir remained — a young woman, the final drop of that poisoned bloodline. She drifted through the rotting mansion in a wine-drunk daze, and the phantom bunnies gathered close around her now, no longer hiding, simply waiting for the end.

In her final days the young woman spoke to the bunnies as if to old friends, pouring them cups of wine, laughing at nothing in the dark. The mansion had no one left to hear her. Therefore she slipped away alone, the last of a line that murder had built.

Therefore the last heir fell, and with her the family that had built its fortune upon lies was wiped from the earth completely, root and branch. Only then, its long work finally complete, did the cursed bunny lamp flicker and go dark at last.

Back by the lamplight, the grandfather finishes his tale and looks at his grandchild with tired, heavy eyes. His friend was avenged, yes. But the curse, once loosed, devoured even the innocent grandchildren too, and that weight he carries with him still.

What it means

The rule is simple and absolute: a curse may fall only upon those who truly deserve it. Therefore the grandfather never sells his craft for petty spite. He waits, sometimes for years, until real injustice arrives to make the curse righteous.

The grandfather hesitated for many nights, the old man admits, because a curse cannot be aimed like an arrow — it spreads through blood, sparing no descendant. Yet his friend's whole family lay in the ground unavenged. Therefore he decided the guilt of the rival was reason enough.

This is Bora Chung's dark genius. Beneath the horror, her cursed objects are really about how greed and cruelty rot a whole society from within — and how vengeance, however deserved, can never stay clean. It spares no one, not even the children of the guilty.

🎧 Read-along audio is being prepared — text-only for now.