SHORT STORIES
DIARY OF A MURDERER AND OTHER STORIES by Kim Young-ha
(Atlantic £8.99)
IN tHE titular tale, retired serial killer Kim Byeongsu is forgetting everything — words, days, events, the last person he murdered. Dementia is erasing his world, replacing vivid recollections with a fog of doubt and despair.
He can’t recall if he really adopted a daughter after slaughtering her parents, if he owns the yellow dog who’s intent on digging up the limbs of his victims, or if the man who claims to be an investigative police officer is really a rival killer. It’s dark and twisted, a grim black comedy where the narrator’s frailty and failing memory are pitched against his torturous past.
No one fares well in Korean Young-ha’s barbed, bleak stories, peopled as they are by an abusive husband, mentally distraught mothers and wives, a distressed kidnapped child and a self-indulgent writer who has an affair with his publisher’s wife and ends up believing he is a corn on the cob . . .
THE HEARTSICK DIASPORA by Elaine Chiew
(Myriad £8.99, 240 pp) tHE characters in Chiew’s stories are often far from home, caught between worlds. Part of the singaporean and Malaysian diasporas, they’ve headed to the U.s. and UK, but are tied to the family and values they’ve left behind, a push-pull of re-invention, cultural expectations and obligation.
In the funny, fantastical A thoroughly Modern Ghost Of Other Origin, a libidinous teenage boy is haunted by an international, constantly hungry ghost whose mantra is ‘feed me or you die’.
In the utterly heartbreaking the Coffin Maker, food is used to smuggle clues to the whereabouts of a missing sister forced into sexual slavery in World War II.
On a lighter note, rap Of the tiger Mother deliciously debunks the myth of strict Asian mothers, as Charlotte gangsta raps the story of her abandonment of the overly ambitious of her son’s prep school in favour of his happiness.
HOTEL DU JACK by Dan Brotzel
(Sandstone £8.99, 240 pp) tHErE are 28 stories here, and while they occasionally veer into cliche, overall they chart the transformative, vengeful, poignant moments of everyday life with an appealing down-to-earth candour.
In Nothing so Blue, the temporary gift of superpowers to office workers in a pub leads to hapless high jinks and an emotionally charged moment with an ill mother.
In Minutes Of Divisional Board Meeting Q4/18, an old-fashioned, toxic, misogynistic work environment is brilliantly exposed by the wonders of modern technology as a meeting is live- streamed to head office, which hears Kieran Detton wondering ‘if the whole equal pay thing hasn’t gone a bit too far’.
the last story, Hotel Du Jack, playfully suggests how the power of a contemplative prize-winning novel changes the attitude of a vain, thoughtless dad, making him finally appreciate his twins and his wife.