The Booker Prize Podcast, Episode 17: Halloween Special, featuring Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung

Spooky season is upon us. While the Booker Prizes’ archive might not be filled to the rafters with tales of horror, Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny is certainly ghostly and horrifying, with elements of magical realism, horror, folklore and science-fiction – a perfect read for this time of year, in fact. Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022, Cursed Bunny, translated from Korean to English by Anton Hur, presents a collection of fantastically surreal, darkly comic and frankly unforgettable stories that address the very real horrors of capitalism and the patriarchy.

Transcripts of The Booker Prize Podcast are generated using both speech recognition software and human transcribers, and as a result, may contain errors.

Jo Hamya:
She was about to flush the toilet.

James Walton:
Mother?

Jo Hamya:
She looked back. There was a head popping out of the toilet calling for her

James Walton:
Mother?

Jo Hamya:
The woman looked at it for a moment, then she flushed the toilet. The head disappeared in a rush of water. She left the bathroom.

James Walton:
Hello, and welcome to the Booker Prize Podcast with me, James Walton.

Jo Hamya:
And me, Jo Hamya.

James Walton:
And today we have a Halloween special for… Halloween. And the book that we’ve chosen in a not massively crowded field of ghost and horror Booker books is definitely both ghostly and horrifying as those first lines of its first story surely suggest.

Jo Hamya:
But before all that, since it’s spooky season, James, I want to know, do you celebrate Halloween? Do you dress up? Do you go to parties?

James Walton:
I’m still slightly resentful of Halloween in it’s an American way kicking the ass of Bonfire Night. So that was always the big one for us growing up. So Halloween was just a few apples in a bowl, and then Firework Night was the biggie a few days later. But obviously for my kids, it’s the other way around and Halloween is their big one.

Jo Hamya:
Yeah, when I was a kid, I was always really resentful of the fact that my parents would take me out trick or treating and they’d let me have a costume on, but then they would put really thick tights and a winter coat over it. So the effect was completely ruined. Because you couldn’t tell what I was dressed at. I was just a kid in tights and a winter coat and maybe like a funny hat or something. So I’m now compromised in my adult years by probably just wearing the least possible amount of clothing on the night.

James Walton:
That seems to be a way these days. Should we move on to reveal what that book with the head in the toilet was?

Jo Hamya:
Yes.

James Walton:
It is Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, a collection of stories that were shortlisted 2022 International Booker Prize. Our inside sources, which of course we’d never reveal, suggest that the winner Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree translated by Daisy Rockwell was pretty unanimous judges choice. But Cursed Bunny was always in the top two or three. And only this month it was announced that the book has also been longlisted for a 2023 National Book award for translated fiction in America.

Jo Hamya:
Yeah, it’s a really good year for that shortlist. Jan Foster, who was also shortlisted that year, has just won the Nobel. But moving back to Bora Chung, we’ll say a bit about her because the last time we did a Korean novel on this podcast, we took on the winner of the 2016 International Prize, The Vegetarian by Han Kang. And Han Kang was already well established in South Korea as one of the country’s leading novelists. She’s already been garlanded with prizes. That’s not the case for Bora Chung. At the time of her shortlisting, she was apparently actually little known even in her home country except in science fiction circles.

James Walton:
So how did she make it out into the world of International Booker and National Book awards and things?

Jo Hamya:
Yeah, Cursed Bunny was at a book fair and she was the one selling it, and her now translator Anton Hur approached her, read the first sentence of the head, which we’ve just read, and said, “This is fantastic. Can I translate this?” She said to him, “Yes, I’m the one who wrote it. You can.”

James Walton:
So that’s the equivalent to flogging your CDs outside the pub after a gig?

Jo Hamya:
Yeah, pretty much.

James Walton:
There’s not an easy book to categorise this. It starts off with two of the most obviously gruesome tails, the head, which we’ve just had, where the head pops out the toilet and it turns out it’s a creature forming itself out of the woman’s sort of excrescents and various other waste products.

Jo Hamya:
Is that a nice way of saying period blood, James?

James Walton:
Yes, it is. Much nicer. No, sorry, I’m not one of those blokes. Yes, okay. Period blood, whatever. Anyway, when that happens, the monster turns red, and then it’s sort of around for the whole of her life. And I think should we give a spoiler alert? But what happens in the end is the creature actually turns once the woman’s quite old, the creature’s fully formed and it’s her younger self, young and beautiful, and then sticks the older woman down the toilet and flushes it. And that’s the end of her.

Jo Hamya:
Or flushes her. Just because she’s old, James.

James Walton:
No, the it was the toilet.

Jo Hamya:
Oh, right. Sorry.

James Walton:
Flushes it, the toilet and the woman disappears forever. And then the second one is pretty odd too, which is a woman who has a period that won’t stop, goes to the gynaecologist and is recommended the pill, but then takes the pill for what the gynaecologist and the obstetrician consider too long. And as a result of slightly unexpected result becomes pregnant, then she has to try and find herself a husband and well, we’ll come onto the patriarchal eness of some of the stories. And then in the end, she doesn’t find a husband. And then the obstetrician says, “If you don’t, this baby’s going to be absolutely not right.” And in fact, the baby is not right in ways that we’ll perhaps leave for the readers to find out for themselves. But anyway, from there we get a mixture of science fiction, magic, realism, fairytale, quite a lot more gruesomeness and quite a lot of ghosts. So Jo, what did you make of this book?

Jo Hamya:
I love it so much. I think it’s amazing. I completely understand why it’s garnered the cult following that it has. All of these stories read like fables or fairytales, even though they’re gruesome. Well, they’re thinking about it. A lot of the original Brothers Grins stories are also quite gruesome.

James Walton:
Oh, really?

Jo Hamya:
And horrible. But I think really, they’re so profoundly weird and you just can’t tell what’s going to happen in any of these stories. But they lend themselves really well to, I guess, allegory. You keep trying to pin down exactly what these stories represent. And I kind of thought of something that you’d said in one of our earlier episodes about trying to find Christ’s face in pita bread.

James Walton:
One thing I developed, the western reviewers weren’t faced with something quite mysterious from some of the Japanese and Korean books we’ve done. Try and reduce it to, oh, this is about Trump or something, it’s way too obvious. These stories are very hard to reduce too.

Jo Hamya:
Yeah, which makes them so rich. And actually, I was listening to an interview with Bora and the interviewer was trying to do that thing that we’re going to attempt to do. They were saying, “What is the coherent theme in these stories? What are you trying to say?” And she went, “The theme is I’m so scared, I’m so confused. I don’t know what is going on.” Which I just think is so perfect because that’s exactly how you feel reading these short stories and not just kind of on a surface level, but also once you start pinning down the potential meanings in the form of the cruelties of capitalism or patriarchy or ideas of revenge in a contemporary society, you also just think, I’m so confused, I’m so scared. I don’t know what’s coming on.

James Walton:
Let’s hope we’ve got regular listeners will know I take a rather stern line on this is all about the patriarchy or this is about capitalism. That’s like seeing Christ tracing pita bread thing. But actually these are, there’s a lot of rage and specifically female rage in them, I think. What were some of your favourite stories? A couple.

Jo Hamya:
Okay. I love this question because all of these stories are so weird and kind of surreal and kind of fairytale like. I think your favourite says a lot about you. I think the story that you attach the most meaning or significance to is probably… I’m not going to go all kind of Freudian psychoanalysis into this, but…

James Walton:
Thank you very much.

Jo Hamya:
I think it’s like a case of transference when you are reading these stories is almost what happens. And my favourite is probably Snare, which is about a father who finds a fox that kind of bleeds gold.

James Walton:
And that’s just for starters, isn’t it? The fox with bleeding gold.

Jo Hamya:
Yes. And it transpires that his son has similar fox like tendencies, and the father starts trying to feed him the blood of other animals to see whether he’ll bleed gold as well. And it only works when he feeds on his sister’s blood. Oh, god. And so, this man literally every night will take his children into this shed outside the house and let his son feed on his daughter so that he can harvest his son’s blood/gold to build a profitable empire. And I don’t know why this story in particular appeals to me.

James Walton:
It’s a great story.

Jo Hamya:
It’s a great story. I think it’s the one-

James Walton:
We’re not completely spoiling this because even that’s only for starters really.

Jo Hamya:
Yeah. I think maybe there’s something in there about exploiting women’s bodies for money that I kind of attach a lot of significance to. But also, there’s just something about the specific nature of the gore that’s taking place in that story that has me riveted.

James Walton:
And something I think about sisters. And if it’s specifically career, my daughter might not agree, but of sisters taking second place to brothers as well. So essentially the daughter is kept sort of in the dark and really only exists for the son to produce gold.

Jo Hamya:
Yeah, go on. James, what’s your favourite?

James Walton:
I mean, there are a lot of good ones. I know we’ve talked about it already, but The Head is an astonishing story. The longest story is also extraordinarily good actually, which is, it’s called Scars. So it starts off with a little boy who’s been kidnapped in a cave. So you can see the use of very familiar fairytale elements.

Jo Hamya:
A lot of children crop up in these stories.

James Walton:
Yeah, and orphans and a monsters because he has a monster that basically pexted his vertebrae in a rob systematic way.

Jo Hamya:
Yeah, it’s called it.

James Walton:
Yeah, it’s called it. In fact, almost nobody’s mentioned by name are they?

Jo Hamya:
No.

James Walton:
The boy is the boy, the woman’s the woman in all the stories, we don’t really find out what anybody’s called. And they’re in a way, just there. Anyway, the boy gets attacked by it, manages to escape, gets to a neighbouring village. You think the bald man, as he’s known throughout the rest of the story, at first treats him rather nicely and you think, oh God, thank God he’s found kindness at last.

Jo Hamya:
No.

James Walton:
But he hasn’t. Because he’s basically being trained up to fight, first of all rabid dogs and then other people, then he escape from that. And then things take a slightly gloomy turn from there. But one thing I thought was quite interesting in that one was that in the end he does take his revenge and he kills it. And then he comes out to find that everything’s disappeared. And I wondered if that suggested that in a way we need monsters.

Jo Hamya:
Yeah, except I think there is the final sentence of that story, which reads actually extremely, hopefully to me contra the idea of we need monsters. It reads, “And once his tears had finally ceased, he began to walk towards the rising sun in search for that place in this world where his life was waiting for him.” So that to me suggests that there is a place where you don’t need to have monsters, where you can exist on what Tennessee Williams once called the kindness of strangers. I mean to me, like this boy who is an orphan, has very limited command of language, no money of his own, but is being used as a form of capital. You don’t need to profit on the exploitation of vulnerable or lower classes or people. You can actually just be nice, be a decent human being.

James Walton:
Okay. Maybe you have shot down my theory, but there’s that world in which strangers are kind is not much an evidence in any other part of the book. It is fairly bleak. There’s also, I think, weirdly, a sort of autobiographical element to some of them. I mean, she talked about the embodiment. That’s the one where birth control pill makes her pregnant and then she has to find a husband and then she doesn’t. And then the baby’s weird. But there’s a phrase in here, the phrase raised at the beginning of it, which says, “A fortnight later, the blood still flowed. Should she see a gynaecologist? But the gynecologist’s office was not a place a young unmarried woman could visit without feeling oddly guilty.”
And she said in one interview that this was sort of based, you wouldn’t think this was a very autobiographical story really, but it’s kind of based on the fact that she had a period that went on and on. She went to see a gynaecologist and her mother said, and she was 28 at the time, I think, Bora Chung. An unmarried woman should never go to a gynaecologist. And she’s saying to her mother, but look, if I’ve had a toothache, I could go to the dentist.” So again, I would suggest that inquires a lot of these stories. There’s the conflict between younger and older women.

Jo Hamya:
Well, maybe we should kind of start to talk about this thematically. So this is one theory that you are really keen on.

James Walton:
I’m very keen on that. That’s with the head, so the head turns into a younger version of a younger self and flushes the old woman down the toilet.

Jo Hamya:
So this is your theory that a lot of these stories contain a kind generational conflict between the young and the old, and maybe specifically younger women versus older women.

James Walton:
Yeah, you buying it?

Jo Hamya:
Honestly, it’s not something that I picked up on while I was reading. An interesting fact about the head that kind of seems to lend to your theory is that in the original Korean, the head actually speaks in a 15th or 16th century dialect. Their voice is incredibly antiquated. And Hur thought that that wouldn’t translate very well for an anglophone audience. So he just kept the head speaking in kind of contemporary English. But it does lend itself to what you’re saying.

James Walton:
I would suggest I’m scared here because I’m a bloke going into a possible lion’s den. But that struck the conflict between younger and older women is playing out in our culture at the moment. So there’s a book, Hags by Victoria Smith came out recently, which is basically middle-aged woman, but only one of many books really saying to young woman, “Women, look, you’re going to be old one day. Could you just show us a bit more respect? Please.” And I know there’s a lot of older feminists that I know. The idea that Jermaine Greer should be under attack from young feminists is at the very least ungrateful and at the very most just completely wrong.

Jo Hamya:
Grateful is always a word that comes out.

James Walton:
As a younger woman yourself, do you think there’s anything in that or am I…

Jo Hamya:
I think generally speaking, what I will say is that there’s always, and this isn’t just specific to feminism, I think this happens in a lot of call them social justice movements where an older generation has advanced ideas of social progress for a younger one. And then that means that the younger generation has certain freedoms that they take for granted, which was always the goal, which in turn means that they never say thank you because they don’t know that they’re supposed to. And that perhaps leaves an older generation feeling slightly, I wouldn’t say resentful, but maybe unappreciated. Actually a former Booker judge, Merve Emre has just written a really great article for the New Yorker about the fact that a lot of feminist discourse recently has kind of become a pop culture product where not enough people have done their reading essentially from the ’60s and ’70s to know how to apply terms like patriarchy, capitalism, emotional labour, etc.
They just sling them around and eventually these words become meaningless. So I do think there’s a kind of credence to the idea of paying attention to past generations, but I wouldn’t kind of fall into that idea of cat fight or pitting one generation against another. But I think that’s kind of complicated in Cursed Bunny because in the head specifically, you were saying that perhaps this woman hasn’t done anything kind of valuable with her life except for raise a child and be a wife.

James Walton:
According to the younger self.

Jo Hamya:
According to the younger self, yes. Chung’s very clear on the fact that a lot of the horror or psychological thriller aspects of these stories arise out of very ordinary everyday subjugation in the case that we’re talking about, particularly for women’s bodies and minds. And so, to say that a younger generation is exacting revenge upon an older one or vice versa, I think to me is a slightly complicated idea because I think you can’t really so bite it, I guess, is what I’m saying. She’s playing with a lot in these stories.

James Walton:
No, that is true. I think, as I say, these stories are endlessly kind of suggestive. There’s so many ways of reading all of them, all of which are kind of really fun to chew over and think about while on the surface it’s just a cracking and sometimes horrifying read.

Jo Hamya:
Yeah.

James Walton:
Just before we leave that behind though, my last attempt to show that there’s something going on, the very last story, which in a way, well, it’s the most baffling to me, but it also does contain this bit. Parents who destroy their children’s lives, who suck the life out of their children’s futures, not only for the sake of maintaining their own illusions, but also to zealously expand them into the lives of their children. Such parents can almost be understood from the perspective of what obsession, following the words, be grateful I raised you is the implied clause instead of killing you or leaving you for dead. I think that answers the gratitude question quite well.

Jo Hamya:
I think a nice place to move on from there actually is the one story that kind of falls under the remit of sci-fi, that AI kind of question in this novel. The story is titled ‘Goodbye My Love,’ and it’s about a narrator who has these kinds of Android models each are kind of upgraded successive, newer ones. She’s really attached to model one, which is the original one that she helped build, but which is kind of really outdated and failing and needs to be constantly kind of connected to a charger. And anyway, she manages to sync model one to her newest model, and so they kind of become like an integrated personality. And the story ends by the three of these bots killing this narrator.
But what I find really fascinating about the story in particular is that usually when you have this kind of Isaac Asimov tale of AI taking over humanity, the humans and the stories are always really suspicious of this technology. There’s a Channel 4 show called Humans that’s essentially about human reluctance to integrate AI into everyday life, to keep AI subjugated. There’s that amazing film that actually taught me how to swear at a robot with Will Smith in it. That covers that ground pretty well as well.

James Walton:
So that’s the film to blame.

Jo Hamya:
Yeah, exactly.

James Walton:
For your potty mouth.

Jo Hamya:
For what our editor, Paul, calls my potty mouth. But the thing in this story is that the narrator really loves model one. And actually, Bora Chung says that the story was originally about her Blackberry, her attachment to her blackberry and how much she loved it, how unwilling she was to let go of it. And it’s true, this narrator expresses real love, like dances with these bots, keeps them stored respectfully, notices when they smile. There’s no kind of suspicion in it. And something amazing I found from one of Chung’s interview was she was saying that she was playing with the idea that the information that we transfer onto our technology is not neutral, it’s entirely human, and that therefore it’s filled with our own biases, hatreds blind spots. And therefore, we should trust it just about as much as we trust ourselves. But it’s sort of up to you to decide whether that’s a whole lot or not very much.

James Walton:
Yes. No, that’s right. So the droids get to know all her needs. They supply exactly the food she wants, everything she likes.

Jo Hamya:
But you have a great theory about this.

James Walton:
But I think the theory of mine that you liked is that generalised fear of robots killing us is a folk memory of slavery in a way that when people had slaves or even, I don’t know, the Mau Mau in Kenya or something, these people that we… I think it’s quite possible for people to be fond of their slaves and servants and so on. But actually while secretly knowing they could rise up and kill us at any time really and would be possibly justified in slow doing.

Jo Hamya:
Yeah, entirely justified. I have this argument with my partner very often. Because he keeps kind of hypothesising like, “If AI becomes so advanced that you could technically have a humanoid kind of bot who comes in to clean the house, would you?” And I always say to him, “No,” because that to me seems exactly like another form of slavery, to have programmed this thing to do exactly what you need it to do, probably for no pay or minimal pay, and to give it no other source of satisfaction or sense of self to just subjugate it to your needs basically-

James Walton:
But that is massively anthropomorphizing, isn’t it?

Jo Hamya:
It is anthropomorphizing. But for me, I fear that that opens up some kind of neural pathway that makes you think it’s okay to do that to anyone or another person, another group of people. It’s kind of precedent for something much darker.

James Walton:
That’s interesting. Now the other thing that we decided… Well, I researched Korean horror by reading a page called Korean Horror on Wikipedia, and nobody can say I slack on this podcast. But one of the things it said that was absolutely central to Korean horror cinema particularly was revenge. Now I know a bit about Korean cinema, I know absolutely nothing, but luckily-

Jo Hamya:
We have someone who does.

James Walton:
We really do. Our producer, Kevin, is going to join us for a couple of minutes to tell us about… Well, basically, is Wikipedia right? Kevin? Is revenge a big thing in Korean horror?

Kevin Muyolo:
Yes. Vengeance is a very big topic, not just in Korean horror cinema, but just Korean cinema as well in general. I think the most famous, most well-known Korean vengeance film is Old Boy, which came out in around 2003 by Part-Time Work. It was part of his vengeance trilogy, starting with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and then Old Boy and then Lady Vengeance. And a lot of the themes basically about vengeance, at least in the Korean cinema, was just the futility of vengeance. It was this very famous quote where if you go seeking vengeance, you should dig two graves, one for-

James Walton:
Jo just got very excited. No, we both just got very excited because…

Jo Hamya:
Because that comes up in the titular story, Cursed Bunny.

Kevin Muyolo:
It’s the kind of theme of a lot of Korean vengeance movies. These main characters are going to seek vengeance, and it just basically ruins them. It’s just like if they would be better off if they just accepted the fade and just forget this.

James Walton:
Parasite, which was obviously an Oscar winning film, which I did see, but those films can’t quite remember entirely, but that happens in that as well, doesn’t it?

Kevin Muyolo:
It does as well. That one’s Bong Joon Ho, who also released his most famous film, Before Parasite, at the same time as Old Boy called Memories of a Murder. It’s about detectives trying to find this person’s murder and they’re not sure who it is, and they just kind of go in their own guts and just go seek vengeance instead of following the law. But yeah, Parasite also kind of deals with that. It’s like this kind of bit a vengeance that gets the wealthy and the upper class by the working class of the Koreans. And it’s a very common theme. It’s something that’s explored a lot in the Korean cinema.

James Walton:
But the working class people, they don’t end up triumphant, do they?

Kevin Muyolo:
No, that’s the whole point. It’s like vengeance just-

James Walton:
That’s very interesting.

Kevin Muyolo:
… doesn’t work for anyone.

James Walton:
Thanks, Kevin. Nice to have someone who knows stuff. I mean, films stuff, we know books, me and Jo. Should we say something singers, that exact phrase, the way that Kevin mentioned that it does come up in the title story where’s there’s a Japanese saying, it says that goes cursing others leads to two graves? So Cursed Bunny, do you want to tell us a little bit about that story?

Jo Hamya:
Yes. The narrator essentially recounts story that her grandfather, although there’s a massive twist towards the end with that, tells her repeatedly about her family’s business, which makes cursed fetishes. And in one particular case, a lamp that kind of is shaped like a bunny, which was made for the head of an owner of an alcohol company who took over and ran into the ground of friends’ distillery, which used to make really beautiful, natural, organic alcohol. So what the grandfather says is, “Yes, his friend’s competition is ruined because what threw a wrench into his plans was a new national food policy at its core was the government’s insistence that Korea secure its rice supply. And that use of rice in the fermenting of spirits was subsequently forbidden. The traditional method of pouring water into a mixture of hard streamed and malted rice and letting it ferment was replaced by ethanol and industrial alcohol, which flooded the market to make this revolting solution palatable beverage companies mix the ethanol with water and artificial flavouring.”
So what happens is a competitor essentially starts spreading lies that the grandfather’s friend’s company’s alcohol causes illnesses, and sanitary is not of good quality in order to promote his own cheaper and inferior alcohol. And the friend being unable to dispute these claims and having his business run into the ground unable to take care of his family, kills himself. And in revenge, the grandfather makes this titular Cursed Bunny fetish and manages to get it delivered to the office of this big alcohol, CEO, where the fetish, and this is where it gets weird, I couldn’t actually fully understand this…

James Walton:
Where it gets weird, it’s pretty weird all the way through.

Jo Hamya:
Kind of becomes several bunnies that start-

James Walton:
That sort of become invisible, they reproduce endlessly.

Jo Hamya:
Yeah. That start chewing through the administrative files of the business, but also leaving droppings around and generally prompting the company to hire exterminators because they think that they’re rats.

James Walton:
They think they’re rats.

Jo Hamya:
Yeah. All hell breaks loose. Meanwhile, the competitor’s son finds this lamp and takes it home, but because the object is cursed…

James Walton:
And then we get this phrase, “The bunny did not chew up the paper in the house of the CEO’s son, it chewed up something else instead.”

Jo Hamya:
Dun, dun, dun.

James Walton:
Yeah. So that’s Cursed Bunny for you.

Jo Hamya:
But I think this is something that Anton Hur says, part of the appeal of revenge in this story in particular actually as Kevin was saying as well, is this idea of the poor getting revenge on the rich or a sort of more vulnerable group of people or a wronged group of people getting revenge on a wealthier and careless and cruel class. But do you think that’s…

James Walton:
I think Kevin’s point stands as well, which is it didn’t end well for the grandfather. Or indeed for the narrator who’s ever telling the story because the book actually ends. “But by the time I sit in that armchair by the window, so by the time she’ll be doing this the same thing, there will be no child or grandchild to listen to my story. And in this twisted wretched life of mine, that single fact remains my soul consolation. I close the door and walk down the hall into complete darkness.” Can I give you one of the big theory? I read an interview with Bora Chung where she talked a very interesting in the times where people saw spirits and fairies and monsters and so on as real beings who lived alongside us. What’s interesting about that is A, that’s most of human history, it’s only comparatively recently that we think all those things are inside us.
And B, I think that’s happening in some recent Western fiction too, because I think Neil Gaiman apparently does it quite a lot. The one I know is Susanna Clark, Jonathan Strange, and Mr. Norrell famous for long listed for the 2004 Booker Prize. And she’s got this thing that she calls, which is from CS Lewis chronological snobbery. And that in turn, Lewis owed to a friend of his called Owen Barfield, at the risk of overloading this with information lion, the witch in the wardrobe is dedicated to bar field’s daughter Lucy. Anyway, Barfield defined chronological snobbery as the belief that, “Intellectually humanity languished for countless generations in the most childish eras on all sorts of crucial subjects until it was redeemed by some simple scientific dictum of the 19th century. So we think all those people who saw spirits and trees and so on were stupid, and now we know better.
And Barfield actually sees that as a great loss that we can’t do that anymore. And so, does Susanna Clarke think, but she regards that. Where has all that gone? Where’s all that stuff gone? And she suggests that it’s gone into fiction. So what she says is something that we fantasy writers do so much better than the literary fiction people is that literary fiction sticks resolutely to the human, but the world seems to be much bigger than that. And so, do you see what I mean, to give things external form? So C. S Lewis has got this book, the Discarded Image, which reminds us that most of human history, all the things that we think take place in our head and rightly, I think. We think that most of human history people have thought that happened outside themselves, and that fiction can restore that sense of wonder that some people think we still should have. And I would suggest that Cursed Bunny is one that does.

Jo Hamya:
Yeah, there is an interview where Bora Chung says, “Myths and legends tell us that what we know is not all, and you should not be arrogant enough to think that your five senses can tell you all there is to feel and perceive and think. Those themes constantly draw me.”

James Walton:
Yes, that is exactly, it isn’t a chronological snobbery. We think all we’ve got is our five senses in our brain, and that’s all there is.

Jo Hamya:
And we were speaking last night about the story, The Frozen Finger, which is about a woman who gets into a car crash, and we meet her at the moment that she’s being dragged out by what’s described as a thin voice who seems to be helping her, kind of jogging her memory, telling her that she was coming back from a housewarming. But then the goalposts keep shifting and this voice gets crueller and crueller. So she’s coming back from a housewarming, but then all of a sudden she’s coming back from a funeral and this voice starts kind of mocking her. All the while this car is kind of sinking into water. That seems to me very specifically based on a kind of Korean ghost story about the water ghost, which is a typically female spirit that pretends to be a person before drowning their victim. But you had a really interesting idea that actually what’s happening to this drowning woman is that she’s watching her life play out.

James Walton:
Again, almost as with everything in this book. These things are not incompatible. So my theory is that the voice and the frozen finger that’s sort of supposedly saving or dragging away from the car says, “Don’t you remember? You obviously bumped your head because we were coming back from a housewarming party of your good friend, she has moved out out of town.” And then she says a bit later on, “Don’t you remember, we were consoling your divorced friend who her husband went off with someone else?” And then later on says, “Won’t you remember, we were coming back from the funeral of your friend who tragically committed suicide after a husband left her” and so on. And obviously it’s all the same woman, because it’s got the same name. My theory is that the woman who’s dying is that woman and that this is their life flashing before her eyes.

Jo Hamya:
So that to me kind of plays with this idea of like, is the monster inside you or outside you? Because I I think that theory totally works, but on my first reading of the story, I saw them as two separate entities. You can really read it both ways.

James Walton:
And also, the idea that we’ve completely outgrown the idea that beings exist outside ourselves rather than just inside us. I mean, two things is one I think when children have night terrors and see monsters. It’s just that they haven’t yet learned that those monsters are inside their head. But in a way, why should they? And also, before we point the finger too much at children, this is slightly free-associating here, but apparently 70% of Americans believe in angels. At least 30% of British people believe in angels and not necessarily religious people either. This idea that there are forces outside us shaping us, no actual beings that aren’t just in our heads, is persistent and it’s not surprising it’s persistent because that’s the way human beings have regarded the world for most of human history.
I think maybe we’ve talked away through this. If you thought that podcast was a bit rambling, I defy anybody to discuss these stories without rambling. And also, I think maybe as we’ve picked up the themes, which is our way and our job in a way, we mustn’t forget that this is a Halloween special. So did these stories sort of unsettle and scare you? Say to me, they unsettled me a lot. I mean, there were a lot of… And some from the very first paragraph that we read so beautifully of the head coming out of the toilet.

Jo Hamya:
I think-

James Walton:
There are some images that I don’t think will leave me for a while.

Jo Hamya:
I think what’s great about these is that even if not all of them kind of unsettle you, she has a wide-ranging enough kind of set of devices or images to discomfort you with that one or two will.

James Walton:
I think we are warmly recommending this for a sort of weird Halloween read. Are we?

Jo Hamya:
Yeah, I definitely would.

James Walton:
Okay. And while we’re at it, any other book or books that might be, Halloweeny? I mean, as I said, it’s not a massively crowded field. It’s not known for its ghost and horror stories, but there was The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters.

Jo Hamya:
Yeah. And do you know what? I had real nightmares after reading The Butcher Boy when you recommended it to me.

James Walton:
That’s our very first podcast, more or less where we first met. Actually, I think the Butcher Boy would frighten you.

Jo Hamya:
Yeah, that is a terrifying novel. And oh God, His Bloody Project.

James Walton:
Oh, yes.

Jo Hamya:
I had real nightmares after reading His Bloody Project as well, because that contains a fairly gruesome account of murder and blood as well.

James Walton:
It does. So two books that we’ve done that literally gave you nightmares. The Butcher Boy and His Bloody Project.

Jo Hamya:
Yeah. That’s it for this week.

James Walton:
You can find out more about the Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung at thebookerprizes.com. And remember to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Substack at the Booker Prizes.

Jo Hamya:
We now have a Booker Prize book club on Facebook, so head to facebook.com/thebookerprizes to find out more. And if you decide to give Cursed Bunny a go, do let us know if it gave you nightmares.

James Walton:
Until next week, happy Halloween.

Jo Hamya:
Happy Halloween.

James Walton:
The Booker Prize podcast is hosted by Jo Hamya and me, James Walton. It’s produced and edited by Kevin Muyolo and the executive producer is John Davenport. It’s a Daddy’s SuperYacht production for the Booker Prize.