To the Kennels: And Other Stories

A woman takes a vacation with a man she barely knows and is abandoned by the side of the road. Dogs savage a man’s child; driving for help, the man doesn’t know whether he’s approaching the hospital or the kennels the dogs escaped from. A wolf escapes the zoo; the person hunting him instead shoots and kills a man dressed in animal skins. Pyun (creative writing, Myongji Univ., Seoul; The Owl Cries) writes of life in a divided world where people don’t connect, and conditions conspire to crush their aspirations. The characters in these eight stories aren’t so much individuals as ciphers. The towns in which they’re set are labeled by letter—L, K, E, P, S—instead of name. Sometimes the people are too; they’re stand-ins for our messed-up world. Pyun’s stories have elements in common with the fiction of Kobo Abe, J.G. Ballard, and Shirley Jackson (she won the Shirley Jackson Award for The Hole). Bad things happen. People’s lives slide from unsettling to out-and-out disturbing. There are no emotional or moral anchors. Reality and fantasy become hard to separate. Stories don’t so much conclude as end, mood pieces as well as narratives.