To the Kennels
And Other Stories
-
- $26.99
-
- $26.99
Publisher Description
An acclaimed story collection from the author of the Shirley Jackson Award–winning novel The Hole
*Booklist Starred Review*
Six elephants bolt from an amusement park and vanish; where they’re found brings back memories of a forgotten dictator. A car ride on a foggy highway at night becomes a drive through hell for a young couple getting away for the weekend together. A family lives the dream of moving from the city to a brand-new bedroom town in the country, only to be plagued by debt and fears of eviction, while the sound of incessant barking rings from the kennels nearby. In a city built on the site of ancient tombs, a homeowner’s renovation of a broken wall leads to an outcome no one expected. Older workers hired to play characters from a folk tale and wear smiles no one believes. An accountant asked to cook the books for his boss. A would-be writer disappointed in her students and her choices.
These are some of the premises and characters in Hye-young Pyun’s To the Kennels, winner of one of Korea’s most prestigious literary awards. Infused with psychological acuity, understated suspense, a touch of the uncanny, and her Kafkaesque take on the contemporary world, To the Kennels offers a thrilling, unsettling ride through territory that is both familiar and strange. As Un-su Kim, author of The Plotters has observed, she “reveals to us the cellular division of emotions we’ve never seen before.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
South Korea is rotten to the core in this disturbing short story collection from Shirley Jackson Award winner Pyun (The Law of Lines). Each of the eight tales teems with images of decay and neglect, including maggots feasting on a bloated corpse and emaciated, constantly barking canines. It's a dog-eat-dog world for Pyun's human characters, too, including the protagonist of "Night Work," who ekes out a living by day as the watchman for the ancient tombs beneath his village, then spends nights shoring up his family home against an onslaught of insects, rodents, and feral cats. Other motifs include headaches and highways. Both appear in the opener, "The Trip," which finds an ill-matched couple setting off for a weekend getaway that turns into a marathon trek through unrelenting fog: "If not for the taillights of the car ahead, she would have believed they were driving through hell." While Pyun delivers some delightful turns of phrase and absurdist humor (as in "Parade," in which six stampeding elephants escape from a third-rate amusement park), the unrelenting grimness of these stories grows wearying fast. Even strong-stomached readers may be exhausted by this queasy house of horrors.
