CURSED BUNNY made me realize what kind of horror really gives me the heebie-jeebies – toilet horror.

Sure, cemeteries and woods can be creepy places, but I can avoid those places. The toilet though? How can anyone avoid that? So when Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung (translated by Anton Hur) opens with the story called The Head, the day after reading it, I wake after a strange dream about a woman in the toilet.

In The Head, a woman is about to flush the toilet when a head pops out and calls her Mother. It keeps appearing in the toilet but when the woman tells her family, they tell her to leave it alone. It doesn’t affect them, so they can ignore it. But the reader can’t, and the writer doesn’t want us to. She wants to send the message out that this is often what it’s like to be a woman – easily dismissed.

The stories in this collection are disturbing. It’s a relentless march through stories with characters who are full of greed, rage, despair. The characters are often nameless: “the daughter”, “the man”, “the youth”. A family creates cursed objects, a man finds a trapped fox that bleeds gold, a woman finds herself pregnant after taking birth control pills.

It’s hard to describe what genres the stories fall into. One reads like an urban ghost story, another like a fairy tale, this one a science fiction one, that one a fable. It’s impressive. It’s grotesque. It’s dark. It’s also mesmerizing. I couldn’t stop reading it.