"Our fears turn feral when they have nowhere to go. South Korean author Bora Chung's new short story collection plays with old horror tropes: endless corridors and looped staircases, exits that only lead you deeper, a phone that rings and rings (don't pick up). The kind of stories dare-drunk children trade in the dark. Set in a research facility known only as the Institute, a repository of cursed and haunted objects,"
"Every room has its own object, and every object its own story. The building is the book; the book is the building. Horror writers have long used story collections as maps and floorplans. King has spent five decades charting the unheimlich corners of Maine, fable by dark fable. Mariana Enriquez haunts, and is haunted by, the ragged neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires. Ray Bradbury etched a blueprint on the body itself, a mortal cartography in The Illustrated Man. And beware room 63 in Daisy Johnson's"
The collection places cursed objects in a research facility called the Institute, where each room contains an apparently mundane item that harbors spectral and murderous force. Objects such as a single shoe or an embroidered handkerchief accumulate backstories and trigger loops, endless corridors, and exits that lead deeper into peril. The Institute occupies a refitted old house with a grisly past and a voluble ghost cat that follows night-shift staff. Communication devices invite hauntings, so phones must be locked away. The tales align the building-as-book conceit with horror's haunted-house lineage, invoking traditions from Stephen King to Mariana Enriquez and Ray Bradbury, while centering marginalized graveyard workers marked by prior violence.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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