Reviews

God-Disease
by an chang joon
Sarabande Books
US, 2025

Korean-American an chang joon has set his debut collection of stories in South Korea, which makes for an enlightening glimpse into a country known mainly for its K-pop and disturbing genre-mixing films, such as those by Bong Joon Ho, with whom the author shares an aesthetic. Which is to say we are not exactly always on solid ground, but quite solid enough for a patina of realism to keep us hanging on.

In the title story, a novella, a young Korean-American travels to Korea to curate a beetle exhibition at a third-rate local museum. In this somewhat surreal context, which we blithely accept, it is discovered that her true purpose for temporary relocation is to learn about her mother, who, suffering from a “god-disease,” left her family in the US to find and be healed in Korea by a mudang (a kind of fortune-teller who serves as a mediator between paying clients and the supernatural world). As the protagonist looks for answers as to why her mother deserted her, and whether or not she lived or died, she and her mother’s lives entwine.

In “Kuleshov Effect” we slowly come to learn the facts behind a young teacher’s memory lapse. The story references a film technique in which context means everything; specifically, it is the phenomenon by which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation. In the teacher’s case, the interaction is truly horrifying.

Other stories slip into uncanny realms near the end, such as in “Separation Anxiety,” which follows two ex-classmates, one still living in the small town where they grew up and the other now living in Seoul. When the city boy returns for a visit to sort out the family house, he stays with his friend, the owner of a dog farm. Past tensions flare, hinting of unresolved issues, which leaves the local boy adrift with his dogs in a nightmarish delirium; while in “Autophagy” P, a doctor from Seoul transferred to a small town, and his wife are driven mad by the pig farms where the pigs outnumber the city’s population a hundred to one, until a livestock virus requires them all to be killed. And then the dead pigs wreak their own deadly havoc.

In “Structural Failures” a young girl who has passed her civil servant exam and is now working in the Department of Architecture at City Hall, continues to live in a goshiwon (a tiny room most often for students) and hide the fact that she has passed the exam. As she tries to help her friend, who has not passed the exam, by reviewing the five reasons for structural failures, she slowly begins to suffer internal structural failures of her own, leaving her thrashing around in a scene you won’t soon forget.

The stories, each and every one, provide an eerily delightful read. On the one hand, we have glances at life in South Korea, from the food (“greasy bowls of Spam and fried kimchi”) to life in a goshiwon to the bizarre practices of the mudang folk religion; while at the same time, we slip far away from the everyday into makeshift and imagined realms where cities and towns are named by letters (J Municipality, etc.), where insects and fish blabber away, and where the characters, in one way or another, are all experiencing some kind of “structural failure.”  Riveting stuff. J.A.

The Book Lovers
by Steve Aylett
Snowbooks Ltd
UK, 2024

For a dazzling delve into absurdist satire, Steve Aylett is your man. Of course, if you’re new to Aylett, you should know that he puts words together in a way you’ve never seen, and what awaits you is a bizarro world. In this latest, that world would be an alt-Victorian steampunk realm where the cast of characters looks eerily familiar. There is Lord Shafto, owner of Shafto Steam and Boiler, and his brilliant, anarchic daughter, Sophie. The country is at war and industrialists Shafto, Baron Talion, and Amerikaan Jeremy Brewster, from the White Colony, are all in competition to supply the military. Sophie, of course, is against the entire venture and disgusted with the empire, which “exhibits all the symptoms of decline—fear, confidence, volume”; hence, we have her and a renegade band of malcontents forming a third front.

Sophie finds a like mind in Jonah Robeck, owner of “a squalid little book cellar, under a looking-glass shop in Drood Street.” Yes, “looking glasses” are far more popular than books; in fact, it is possible to buy a book of only looking-glasses: “A glass book allows a person to look all day at their own surface, while appearing deep.”  Reading books is “beyond unfashionable” but not yet illegal—is it?

What brought Sophie to the book cellar was a novel given to her by an admirer, titled Darkle the Wise by Hugo Carpstein, a book she read as a child but upon rereading discovers a different ending—could it be a “forked book?” Jonah and Sophie will track the author down to find out, but before that meeting, Sophie remembers that she is “scheduled to be kidnapped!” No matter, she runs around without constraint while an eccentric poet, Sir Percy Valentine (aka Thomas Dollivar), whose “hair stood up in italics,” and who “poses as a zany at the Domino Club” of the industrialists, emerges in the resistance.

Lord Shafto hires Detective Inspector Nightjar—“that inflated vultress”—to find Sophie’s kidnapper and she dutifully interrogates everyone while reporting to Chancellor Swive, who can’t stop raging against the anarchists; i.e., “book eaters” and their “voodoo frenzies known as reading circles.”

Brewster, meanwhile, espouses on the current political situation: “Fear is the optimal motivator. What else can make whole populations march backward into their own waste?”And of the Tories: “The only warmth they have is when the tea’s going down.” He may be part of the whole sick crew, but he sees it for what it is. For their part, the resistance speaks of the 1860s, the Vivid Age, “which seems to have been one of those warm corners in time, an untouched adjunct where thoughts and feelings were allowed to happen.” It’s all out resistance now, however, with all kinds of havoc lying in wait.

Of course, there is talk along the way of “zero point galvanics,” “voltaics,” “etherics,” “pocket vortexes,” “convolving hammer gears,” “diachronic-suppressive valves”—you get the idea. And it’s a hoot. But also dead profound: within the dystopian cauldron of Thousand Tower City, the looking glass catches us all in its reflection, and that’s enough to give pause.

There is a plot to hang on to, but it’s the line by line musings that pull us along, which is why it’s hard not to throw out so many quotes. Hugo Carpstein says at one point:  “I cranked the alphabet extra hard. Turns out I wasn’t bad at stinging the page.” That’s Aylett, and he knows it and knows we know it. Bless.  JA