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To the Kennels: And Other Stories
An acclaimed story collection from the author of the Shirley Jackson Award–winning novel The Hole 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 disapppointed 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.”
192 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
17 people are currently reading
507 people want to read
About the author
Hye-Young Pyun
27 books225 followers편혜영(片惠英,1972년~)은 대한민국의 소설가이다. 서울에서 태어났으며, 서울예대 문예창작과를 졸업하고 한양대학교 국어국문학과 대학원 석사과정을 졸업했다. 2000년 서울신문 신춘문예에 단편소설 〈이슬털기〉가 당선되면서 데뷔했다. 2007년 단편소설 〈사육장 쪽으로〉로 제40회 한국일보문학상을, 2009년 단편소설 〈토끼의 묘〉로 제10회 이효석문학상을, 2012년 소설집 〈저녁의 구애〉로 제42회 동인문학상을, 2014년 단편소설 〈몬순〉으로 제38회 이상문학상을 수상했다. 현재 명지대학교 문예창작학과 교수(2013~)로 재직 중이다.
Pyun Hye-young was born in Seoul in 1972. She earned her undergraduate degree in creative writing and graduate degree in Korean literature from Hanyang University. After receiving these degrees, Pyun worked as an office worker, and many office workers appear in her stories.
Pyun began publishing in 2000 and published three collections of stories, Aoi Garden, To The Kennels, and Evening Courtship as well as the novel Ashes and Red. In 2007, To the Kennels won the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award, in 2009 the short story O Cuniculi won the Yi Hyo-Seok Literature prize and then the Today’s Young Writer Award in 2010, while in 2011 Evening Courtship won the Dong-in Literary Award. Her works have several themes including alienation in modern life, an apocalyptic world, and they are often infused with grotesque images. The novel Ashes and Red explores irony and the dual nature of humanity.
Pyun Hye-young was born in Seoul in 1972. She earned her undergraduate degree in creative writing and graduate degree in Korean literature from Hanyang University. After receiving these degrees, Pyun worked as an office worker, and many office workers appear in her stories.
Pyun began publishing in 2000 and published three collections of stories, Aoi Garden, To The Kennels, and Evening Courtship as well as the novel Ashes and Red. In 2007, To the Kennels won the Hankook Ilbo Literary Award, in 2009 the short story O Cuniculi won the Yi Hyo-Seok Literature prize and then the Today’s Young Writer Award in 2010, while in 2011 Evening Courtship won the Dong-in Literary Award. Her works have several themes including alienation in modern life, an apocalyptic world, and they are often infused with grotesque images. The novel Ashes and Red explores irony and the dual nature of humanity.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
January 20, 2025
The dark, dirty dregs, the untold depths, the putrid hole.
He stayed as far away from it as possible.
To the Kennels: And Other Stories (2025) is the translation by Sora Kim-Russell and Heinz Insu Fenkl of the story collection 사육장 쪽으로 (2007) by 편혜영 (Hye-Young Pyun).
This is the sixth of the author's works I've read in translation (see below for a bibliography) and I should start with the same disclaimer as previously. Reading all the translated Korean literature I can find does inevitably mean I venture into genres that aren’t my usual literary fare - e.g. I wouldn't typically read a Stephen King novel. And my reviews/ratings are personal subjective ones rather the objective judgements on the quality of the work. And with 편혜영 this means that my ratings haven't risen above 3 star - while her Shirley Jackson Award winning Hole in particular was clearly a great example of its type, it wasn't really for me.
Here, the 8 stories, with their original title, translator, page count and my * rating are:
소풍 - The Trip (Heinz Insu Fenkl) - 24pp - 3*
사육장 쪽으로 - To the Kennels (Heinz Insu Fenkl, from a previous co-translation with Yoosup Chang) - 22pp - 3.5*
동물원의 탄생 - Birth of the Zoo (Sora Kim-Russell) - 22pp - 2.5*
밤의 공사 - Night Work (Sora Kim-Russell) - 22pp - 4*
퍼레이드 - Parade (Sora Kim-Russell) - 20pp - 2*
금요일의 안부인사 - Friday Hello (Sora Kim-Russell) - 22pp - 4.5*
분실물 - Lost and Found (Heinz Insu Fenkl) - 22pp - 3*
첫 번째 기념일- Commemoration (Heinz Insu Fenkl) - 20pp - 3*
The Trip opens:
The fog settled even more thickly after they passed the tollgate.
Cars were moving slowly as if the road were covered in ice. There had been a fourteen-car pileup on the main Han River bridge not long ago: twelve dead, thirty-nine injured—a major accident. It was because of the fog.
The man slowed gradually and pulled to the side of the road. He wanted to check the map again so they wouldn't get lost. Dense fog wrapped itself around the stopped car.
"This is the road we should take."
With his finger, the man indicated the road. On the surface of the map, it seemed to go on forever. In reality, it would be much more complicated than what was shown there. Maps are always simpler than reality. The woman felt a twinge of motion sickness just looking at the yellow lines
톨게이트를 지나자 안개가 한충 두껍게 내려앉았다. 차들은 빙 판길을 지날 때처럼 서행하고 있었다. 얼마 전 한 대교 위에서 십 사중 충돌사고가 일어났다. 사망자 열두 명 . 부상자가 서른아홉 명이나 발생한 대형 사고였다. 안개 때문이었다.
남자는 서서히 속도를 줄여 갓길에 차를 세웠다. 길을 앓지 않기 위해 다시 한번 지도를 확인하고 싶어졌다. 짙은 안개가 정차한 차 주변을 에워쌌 다.
이게 우리가 가야 할 길이야.
남자가 지도 위의 도로를· 손가락 으로 가리켰다. 지도 위에서 길은 끝없이 이어져 있었다. 여자는 노랗게 칠해진 길을 보는 것만으로도 멀미가 나는 것 같았다. 실 제 도로는 지도에 나타난 것보다 횔씬 복잡할 거였다. 지도는 언 제나 현실보다 단순하게 마련이었다.
The couple are on a weekend break out of Seoul which they've squeezed into their mutually busy working schedules, leaving late on Friday night, and with a planned 7 hour overnight drive to their coastal destination, but which proves to be much longer in the dense fog, and, in pre satnav days, navigating with the aid of a map. And as they travel, they seem to be followed by a lorry (or is it the same lorry?), which is driving aggressively and seemingly keen on running them off the road (the characters in another story have a similar experience).
Many of the stories, in Tzvetan Todorov's terms, start in the fantastic, but often as Todorov would say, quickly "leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous", and this falls more into the uncanny, the characters' accepting what has happened as explainable.
This is one of a number of stories which ends with the protagonist - here the woman - not quite clear where they are or where they are going:
“The sign gave the name of the city where she would arrive at some time in the future but was mute about where she was at the moment.” (The Trip)
“The road would end eventually. If he kept following it to the end, he would reach someplace.”(To The Kennels)
“Up to his neck now in the muddy water, he inched closer to home.” (Night Work)
“The boxes in the luggage racks rattled a bit as he climbed into the van and drove off into the night with his packages” (Commemoration)
The title story To The Kennels has a couple, with a young child, living in a newly built city which is proving to be something of a nightmare. The peace and quiet is disturbed by the barking of dogs seemingly coming from some breeding kennels nearby, but dogs pred not as pets, but for meat or fighting or perhaps worse:
Once he left the new road, the sound of dogs barking was especially loud. There were kennels where they bred dogs near the village. Mr. Y had said that since the breeder was unlicensed, the kennels would be shut down by the local authorities and would be gone soon. They had tried to force the kennels to relocate but so far had succeeded only in slowing their growth. His wife was hesitant about the move when she heard, but it didn't concern him.
Even if the breeder's dogs were ferocious enough to maul each other to death, they would be no problem unless they were somehow to attack a family. In their cramped cages, the dogs would consume the same feed, sleep and wake at around the same time, be sold off to this place or that at random, and in the end be gruesomely roasted to death.
But when an escaped dog savages their child, and they try to drive to the hospital, which is apparently in the direction of the kennels, it seems that the barking is coming from everywhere and nowhere, in hills also dotted with ancient burial mounds.
A burial mound plays a more central role in Night Work, with a couple in a similarly nightmarish house in a once-new development, and one of my favourite stories of the collection.
Their house has a pond to one side - increasingly putrid - a tomb to the other which they are not allowed to be disturbed, and a crumbling garden wall joined to their house and threatening it both structurally and linking it to the death and decay.
Back when his wife had told him the house came with a pond, he'd pictured a dainty green frog perched atop a glistening lily pad. Indeed, the water was covered in padlike leaves floating on the surface, but they were as filthy as their tangled mess of stems.
The slime surrounding them was cloudy and thick like expelled phlegm. It was no place for small green frogs. Instead, what frequented the pond were enormous bullfrogs that croaked at all hours of the day and night, rodents that preyed on the bullfrogs, cats that preyed on the rodents, and enormous feral cats stalking the much smaller house cats. Every loud, dirty thing seemed to gather at the marsh.
But the man's plans to demolish and rebuild the wall have to be conducted in secret, due to the stringent planning conditions (and neighbours seemingly determined to drag each other down, rather than see others escape) and unleash something seemingly more sinister from the pond.
Another favourite was Friday Hello, in many respects a simpler tale with no hint of the supernatural. Three men, who live in the same block of flats, meet late every Friday night to play cards, for relatively low stakes. Each has their own problems, mainly financial - one a leveraged speculator with expensive maintanance to pay to a wife and child overseas; one a chicken shop franchisee struggling with falling sales due to bird flu, having borrowed excessively to refurbish his shop; one a salaryman middle manager, wondering when he might receive a promotion.
But the purpose of the game is not for each of them to win back what they've lost elsewhere, but rather the relief of spending time with fellows who aren't aware of, and have little interest in their story: There were no issues he had to discuss with them and no worries he had to share.
Birth of the Zoo has a zoo where both a flock of birds escapes (the first paragraph below striking in the aftemath of Jeju Air Flight 2216) and then a wolf, each causing a different type of panic in the population:
People panicked at the sight of birds. Birds Hocked to airports, disrupting flight paths. This had always been a problem at air-ports, but everyone blamed the birds from the zoo. They planted feed laced with poison around the city. Innocent homeless people died. The birds shat on the bodies of the dead homeless.
The city after dark belonged to the birds that flew low in search of prey and the hunters in search of a wolf. There was only one wolf, but there were countless hunters. It was terrifying to bump into one of them in an out-of-the-way alley without even a single security light. Most carried unlicensed firearms. The rumors kept coming of people gunned down by hunters. A bullet could pass right through a heart without anyone knowing who the bullet belonged to.
As the above suggests, the hunters prove more dangerous that the wolves, although this story was one of a few that seemed to rather peter out rather have a distinct ending.
Parade also features escaped animals, but this time from a theme park - five elephants from the daily parade. The story mixes both the perspectives of four of the performers in the parade (rather like Friday Hello they each have their own back stories) with a more supernatural one of the escaped animals who, despite their size, literally vanish from the hills to which they run, only to reappear in a mysterious underground bunker. This perhaps strayed to far into the marvellous/supernatural for me, and I wasn't clear what the story was attempting to convey.
Lost And Found is a story of a salaryman whose long-awaited promotion comes with a requirement to work on some secret, probably fradulent, documents for his boss. The day after he completes the task, working late into the night at home, he falls asleep on the train to the office and loses the briefcase with his work (misplaced? stolen?) but then, and in the more fantastical side of the story, also seems to lose his ability to distinguish faces and increasingly his grip on life.
Commemoration is an offbeat story of a deliveryman who frequently, particularly days where there is nothing really to commemorate, has his photo taken by a professional photographer on his delivery round. The photos he attachs to CVs he sends for rather speculative, almost joking, appplications for jobs for which is not really suited. Meanwhile he develops a plan to sell on his delivery franchise to the photographer, making out the work is easier than it really is, and, finding the occupants of one flat to who he regularly delivers goods, is no longer at her house (the block of flats subject to a major refurbishment) decides to take the random objects she orders (a pot plant, a bamboo mat, some fancy cooking oil, two hats etc) for himself. A suitably quirky end for a quirky collection.
Bibliography
I've previously read four novels by the same author, in Sora Kim-Russell's translations:
The Hole (홀, 2016) - my review
The Law of Lines (선의 법칙. 2015) - my review.
City of Ash and Red (재와 빨강, 2010) - my review
The Owl Cries (서쪽 숲에 갔다, 2012) - my review
as well as a previous collection of short-stories from another translator (and where the translation was unfortunately an issue): Evening Proposal (저녁의 구애, 2011) - my review
He stayed as far away from it as possible.
To the Kennels: And Other Stories (2025) is the translation by Sora Kim-Russell and Heinz Insu Fenkl of the story collection 사육장 쪽으로 (2007) by 편혜영 (Hye-Young Pyun).
This is the sixth of the author's works I've read in translation (see below for a bibliography) and I should start with the same disclaimer as previously. Reading all the translated Korean literature I can find does inevitably mean I venture into genres that aren’t my usual literary fare - e.g. I wouldn't typically read a Stephen King novel. And my reviews/ratings are personal subjective ones rather the objective judgements on the quality of the work. And with 편혜영 this means that my ratings haven't risen above 3 star - while her Shirley Jackson Award winning Hole in particular was clearly a great example of its type, it wasn't really for me.
Here, the 8 stories, with their original title, translator, page count and my * rating are:
소풍 - The Trip (Heinz Insu Fenkl) - 24pp - 3*
사육장 쪽으로 - To the Kennels (Heinz Insu Fenkl, from a previous co-translation with Yoosup Chang) - 22pp - 3.5*
동물원의 탄생 - Birth of the Zoo (Sora Kim-Russell) - 22pp - 2.5*
밤의 공사 - Night Work (Sora Kim-Russell) - 22pp - 4*
퍼레이드 - Parade (Sora Kim-Russell) - 20pp - 2*
금요일의 안부인사 - Friday Hello (Sora Kim-Russell) - 22pp - 4.5*
분실물 - Lost and Found (Heinz Insu Fenkl) - 22pp - 3*
첫 번째 기념일- Commemoration (Heinz Insu Fenkl) - 20pp - 3*
The Trip opens:
The fog settled even more thickly after they passed the tollgate.
Cars were moving slowly as if the road were covered in ice. There had been a fourteen-car pileup on the main Han River bridge not long ago: twelve dead, thirty-nine injured—a major accident. It was because of the fog.
The man slowed gradually and pulled to the side of the road. He wanted to check the map again so they wouldn't get lost. Dense fog wrapped itself around the stopped car.
"This is the road we should take."
With his finger, the man indicated the road. On the surface of the map, it seemed to go on forever. In reality, it would be much more complicated than what was shown there. Maps are always simpler than reality. The woman felt a twinge of motion sickness just looking at the yellow lines
톨게이트를 지나자 안개가 한충 두껍게 내려앉았다. 차들은 빙 판길을 지날 때처럼 서행하고 있었다. 얼마 전 한 대교 위에서 십 사중 충돌사고가 일어났다. 사망자 열두 명 . 부상자가 서른아홉 명이나 발생한 대형 사고였다. 안개 때문이었다.
남자는 서서히 속도를 줄여 갓길에 차를 세웠다. 길을 앓지 않기 위해 다시 한번 지도를 확인하고 싶어졌다. 짙은 안개가 정차한 차 주변을 에워쌌 다.
이게 우리가 가야 할 길이야.
남자가 지도 위의 도로를· 손가락 으로 가리켰다. 지도 위에서 길은 끝없이 이어져 있었다. 여자는 노랗게 칠해진 길을 보는 것만으로도 멀미가 나는 것 같았다. 실 제 도로는 지도에 나타난 것보다 횔씬 복잡할 거였다. 지도는 언 제나 현실보다 단순하게 마련이었다.
The couple are on a weekend break out of Seoul which they've squeezed into their mutually busy working schedules, leaving late on Friday night, and with a planned 7 hour overnight drive to their coastal destination, but which proves to be much longer in the dense fog, and, in pre satnav days, navigating with the aid of a map. And as they travel, they seem to be followed by a lorry (or is it the same lorry?), which is driving aggressively and seemingly keen on running them off the road (the characters in another story have a similar experience).
Many of the stories, in Tzvetan Todorov's terms, start in the fantastic, but often as Todorov would say, quickly "leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous", and this falls more into the uncanny, the characters' accepting what has happened as explainable.
This is one of a number of stories which ends with the protagonist - here the woman - not quite clear where they are or where they are going:
“The sign gave the name of the city where she would arrive at some time in the future but was mute about where she was at the moment.” (The Trip)
“The road would end eventually. If he kept following it to the end, he would reach someplace.”(To The Kennels)
“Up to his neck now in the muddy water, he inched closer to home.” (Night Work)
“The boxes in the luggage racks rattled a bit as he climbed into the van and drove off into the night with his packages” (Commemoration)
The title story To The Kennels has a couple, with a young child, living in a newly built city which is proving to be something of a nightmare. The peace and quiet is disturbed by the barking of dogs seemingly coming from some breeding kennels nearby, but dogs pred not as pets, but for meat or fighting or perhaps worse:
Once he left the new road, the sound of dogs barking was especially loud. There were kennels where they bred dogs near the village. Mr. Y had said that since the breeder was unlicensed, the kennels would be shut down by the local authorities and would be gone soon. They had tried to force the kennels to relocate but so far had succeeded only in slowing their growth. His wife was hesitant about the move when she heard, but it didn't concern him.
Even if the breeder's dogs were ferocious enough to maul each other to death, they would be no problem unless they were somehow to attack a family. In their cramped cages, the dogs would consume the same feed, sleep and wake at around the same time, be sold off to this place or that at random, and in the end be gruesomely roasted to death.
But when an escaped dog savages their child, and they try to drive to the hospital, which is apparently in the direction of the kennels, it seems that the barking is coming from everywhere and nowhere, in hills also dotted with ancient burial mounds.
A burial mound plays a more central role in Night Work, with a couple in a similarly nightmarish house in a once-new development, and one of my favourite stories of the collection.
Their house has a pond to one side - increasingly putrid - a tomb to the other which they are not allowed to be disturbed, and a crumbling garden wall joined to their house and threatening it both structurally and linking it to the death and decay.
Back when his wife had told him the house came with a pond, he'd pictured a dainty green frog perched atop a glistening lily pad. Indeed, the water was covered in padlike leaves floating on the surface, but they were as filthy as their tangled mess of stems.
The slime surrounding them was cloudy and thick like expelled phlegm. It was no place for small green frogs. Instead, what frequented the pond were enormous bullfrogs that croaked at all hours of the day and night, rodents that preyed on the bullfrogs, cats that preyed on the rodents, and enormous feral cats stalking the much smaller house cats. Every loud, dirty thing seemed to gather at the marsh.
But the man's plans to demolish and rebuild the wall have to be conducted in secret, due to the stringent planning conditions (and neighbours seemingly determined to drag each other down, rather than see others escape) and unleash something seemingly more sinister from the pond.
Another favourite was Friday Hello, in many respects a simpler tale with no hint of the supernatural. Three men, who live in the same block of flats, meet late every Friday night to play cards, for relatively low stakes. Each has their own problems, mainly financial - one a leveraged speculator with expensive maintanance to pay to a wife and child overseas; one a chicken shop franchisee struggling with falling sales due to bird flu, having borrowed excessively to refurbish his shop; one a salaryman middle manager, wondering when he might receive a promotion.
But the purpose of the game is not for each of them to win back what they've lost elsewhere, but rather the relief of spending time with fellows who aren't aware of, and have little interest in their story: There were no issues he had to discuss with them and no worries he had to share.
Birth of the Zoo has a zoo where both a flock of birds escapes (the first paragraph below striking in the aftemath of Jeju Air Flight 2216) and then a wolf, each causing a different type of panic in the population:
People panicked at the sight of birds. Birds Hocked to airports, disrupting flight paths. This had always been a problem at air-ports, but everyone blamed the birds from the zoo. They planted feed laced with poison around the city. Innocent homeless people died. The birds shat on the bodies of the dead homeless.
The city after dark belonged to the birds that flew low in search of prey and the hunters in search of a wolf. There was only one wolf, but there were countless hunters. It was terrifying to bump into one of them in an out-of-the-way alley without even a single security light. Most carried unlicensed firearms. The rumors kept coming of people gunned down by hunters. A bullet could pass right through a heart without anyone knowing who the bullet belonged to.
As the above suggests, the hunters prove more dangerous that the wolves, although this story was one of a few that seemed to rather peter out rather have a distinct ending.
Parade also features escaped animals, but this time from a theme park - five elephants from the daily parade. The story mixes both the perspectives of four of the performers in the parade (rather like Friday Hello they each have their own back stories) with a more supernatural one of the escaped animals who, despite their size, literally vanish from the hills to which they run, only to reappear in a mysterious underground bunker. This perhaps strayed to far into the marvellous/supernatural for me, and I wasn't clear what the story was attempting to convey.
Lost And Found is a story of a salaryman whose long-awaited promotion comes with a requirement to work on some secret, probably fradulent, documents for his boss. The day after he completes the task, working late into the night at home, he falls asleep on the train to the office and loses the briefcase with his work (misplaced? stolen?) but then, and in the more fantastical side of the story, also seems to lose his ability to distinguish faces and increasingly his grip on life.
Commemoration is an offbeat story of a deliveryman who frequently, particularly days where there is nothing really to commemorate, has his photo taken by a professional photographer on his delivery round. The photos he attachs to CVs he sends for rather speculative, almost joking, appplications for jobs for which is not really suited. Meanwhile he develops a plan to sell on his delivery franchise to the photographer, making out the work is easier than it really is, and, finding the occupants of one flat to who he regularly delivers goods, is no longer at her house (the block of flats subject to a major refurbishment) decides to take the random objects she orders (a pot plant, a bamboo mat, some fancy cooking oil, two hats etc) for himself. A suitably quirky end for a quirky collection.
Bibliography
I've previously read four novels by the same author, in Sora Kim-Russell's translations:
The Hole (홀, 2016) - my review
The Law of Lines (선의 법칙. 2015) - my review.
City of Ash and Red (재와 빨강, 2010) - my review
The Owl Cries (서쪽 숲에 갔다, 2012) - my review
as well as a previous collection of short-stories from another translator (and where the translation was unfortunately an issue): Evening Proposal (저녁의 구애, 2011) - my review
September 20, 2025
Watch my review on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2JjW...
Watch my Pyun Hye-young Roundup on YouTube here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIz9G...
Read my review on Substack here - https://open.substack.com/pub/barrywe...
Watch my Pyun Hye-young Roundup on YouTube here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIz9G...
Read my review on Substack here - https://open.substack.com/pub/barrywe...
Read
December 22, 2024These were generally interesting but a number were half-baked and have that Rules of Attraction style ending where they just kind of
February 9, 2025
Just no
August 8, 2025
I read about 3 stories and I didn't find it to be impressive. I personally found it to be quite boring which is a shame because I don't think I've read any books from Korean authors.
DNF because I want to focus on other books.
DNF because I want to focus on other books.
May 2, 2025
“Whenever he was thirsty like this, he felt the urge to drink the bloody water he’d soaked the raw chicken in.” These are not technically horror stories in that nothing supernatural ever really happens and the boogie man is generally just human society, but they are really very well crafted horror stories in their own way.
October 29, 2025
Rounded off to 4*. If I rated this less, know that it's because I'm 'slow' to grasp what Pyun has offered/placed in her work/writing. A very intelligent and brilliant piece of text, translated brilliantly too. However definitely not a feel-good read, quite the opposite frankly. Like her other one I've read,The Hole, it's got a ton of social commentaries disguised as what may seem to one as just simple horror. Will have to read this again at a later date.
August 3, 2025
"How many occasions can you commemorate, anyway?" Writing the date on the back of the photo, the man answered as if he'd been thinking about it for a long time, "Isn't every day worth commemorating?"
A novel full of some short-lived and half-baked stories with sudden inconclusive endings, as well as thought-provoking and fantasy themed pieces of text throughout.
As a reader, dwelling on the obviously factual notion that each short story in this book travels rather slowly and ends abruptly is not entirely important. Admittedly, whilst this is done intentionally, it rarely provides the reader with any opportunity to "use your own imagination to complete the story".
However, Hye-Young Pyun has cleverly created different landscapes, personalities , themes and fantasies in these stories without losing the essence of her personal writing capabilities. Each character, although some forgettable, have their own issues and problematic lifestyle's. Many are presented as resentful and incapable, unable to function has normal human beings. From a personal perspective, the dullness and dreariness of the characters and environments used in these stories convinces me never to meet them or travel to these areas, albeit all imaginary anyway.
Whilst I wouldn't necessarily recommend this to a reader who is interested in fast-paced storytelling, it is undeniable that this could be used as inspirational text for character development and thought-provoking notions.
A novel full of some short-lived and half-baked stories with sudden inconclusive endings, as well as thought-provoking and fantasy themed pieces of text throughout.
As a reader, dwelling on the obviously factual notion that each short story in this book travels rather slowly and ends abruptly is not entirely important. Admittedly, whilst this is done intentionally, it rarely provides the reader with any opportunity to "use your own imagination to complete the story".
However, Hye-Young Pyun has cleverly created different landscapes, personalities , themes and fantasies in these stories without losing the essence of her personal writing capabilities. Each character, although some forgettable, have their own issues and problematic lifestyle's. Many are presented as resentful and incapable, unable to function has normal human beings. From a personal perspective, the dullness and dreariness of the characters and environments used in these stories convinces me never to meet them or travel to these areas, albeit all imaginary anyway.
Whilst I wouldn't necessarily recommend this to a reader who is interested in fast-paced storytelling, it is undeniable that this could be used as inspirational text for character development and thought-provoking notions.
August 11, 2025
It's hard to put into words what I liked about this book considering the content - each story centers around deeply unhappy people. But I enjoyed that common theme throughout. The characters all resent their jobs or spouses or lives in general but each character perseveres. Even when a character realizes they've made a huge mistake, they keep going. Would I recommend doing that? No, but it's fun to read about even though technically the subject matter is fairly glum. There's also clearly a lot of symbolism and deeper meaning to each of the stories but I'm not very good at working that kind of stuff out. Regardless, even for people who struggle to be analytical like me, each of the stories have realistic plots but there's something that feels "off" about them - is there something supernatural or is the narrator just losing it?
My favorite stories are "To the Kennels" and "Birth of the Zoo." BOTZ was fun to read because you start off seeing that clearly there's several disasters just waiting to happen with seemingly nothing done to prevent them. That's always a recipe for an entertaining time. I did notice throughout some of the short stories (in BOTZ in particular) that because most characters are unnamed it can get kind of confusing to tell who's who. For example, one sentence is about two unnamed men, and the following sentence mentions "he" does something - which man is this talking about? You can still figure it out if you think for a minute but it does break up the flow of the stories at times. Overall, I enjoyed this collection by Pyun and I'm looking forward to reading more from her. I would definitely recommend this to anyone looking for a short story collection that's both semi-painfully real but also surreal.
Date Read: 12/09/24 - 12/10/24
STORIES:
The Trip - A couple on the brink of breaking up go on a road trip to have their long-delayed vacation.
To the Kennels - After moving to a subdivision in the countryside surrounded by mysterious dog kennels, a family of city-dwellers receive an eviction notice and struggle to decide if they should act on it or just ignore it.
Birth of the Zoo - After a wolf escapes from the zoo, the local citizens arm themselves and go out to hunt every single night.
Night Work - A man must work at night to illegally tear down his decrepit garden wall that lets in all sorts of pests from the putrid marsh just outside it.
Parade - Shortly after being sold to a failing amusement park, six elephants flee into the mountains and vanish.
Friday Hello - Three unhappy men meet every Friday to play poker.
Lost and Found - While waiting for his promotion, an office worker starts to lose the ability to recognize faces.
Commemoration - A deliveryman decides to keep the packages of a patron who stops answering her door.
My favorite stories are "To the Kennels" and "Birth of the Zoo." BOTZ was fun to read because you start off seeing that clearly there's several disasters just waiting to happen with seemingly nothing done to prevent them. That's always a recipe for an entertaining time. I did notice throughout some of the short stories (in BOTZ in particular) that because most characters are unnamed it can get kind of confusing to tell who's who. For example, one sentence is about two unnamed men, and the following sentence mentions "he" does something - which man is this talking about? You can still figure it out if you think for a minute but it does break up the flow of the stories at times. Overall, I enjoyed this collection by Pyun and I'm looking forward to reading more from her. I would definitely recommend this to anyone looking for a short story collection that's both semi-painfully real but also surreal.
Date Read: 12/09/24 - 12/10/24
STORIES:
The Trip - A couple on the brink of breaking up go on a road trip to have their long-delayed vacation.
To the Kennels - After moving to a subdivision in the countryside surrounded by mysterious dog kennels, a family of city-dwellers receive an eviction notice and struggle to decide if they should act on it or just ignore it.
Birth of the Zoo - After a wolf escapes from the zoo, the local citizens arm themselves and go out to hunt every single night.
Night Work - A man must work at night to illegally tear down his decrepit garden wall that lets in all sorts of pests from the putrid marsh just outside it.
Parade - Shortly after being sold to a failing amusement park, six elephants flee into the mountains and vanish.
Friday Hello - Three unhappy men meet every Friday to play poker.
Lost and Found - While waiting for his promotion, an office worker starts to lose the ability to recognize faces.
Commemoration - A deliveryman decides to keep the packages of a patron who stops answering her door.
March 13, 2025
Almost all of Hye-young’s protagonists in this anthology are unified by an obsession with escape, whether it be from a job, city, or home. Very few of them have a clear idea of what they’re escaping to exactly, but are instead simply driven by a deep dissatisfaction with what they currently have. This quest invariably leads to strife, and most of her characters end up a good deal more miserable than how they started because of it.
Not all of her stories end in misery, however. Hye-young offers some glimmer of hope for a select few of her protagonists, who draw on the meager goodness in their lives rather than deny their situation altogether. While still seeking to improve their circumstances, these characters allow themselves to find joy and comfort through self-expression and (more importantly) community. The message isn’t that one should just be complacent in their given station, but instead that focusing only on escaping circumstance at the cost of all else will lead one only to despair.
So a very good book overall!!
Not all of her stories end in misery, however. Hye-young offers some glimmer of hope for a select few of her protagonists, who draw on the meager goodness in their lives rather than deny their situation altogether. While still seeking to improve their circumstances, these characters allow themselves to find joy and comfort through self-expression and (more importantly) community. The message isn’t that one should just be complacent in their given station, but instead that focusing only on escaping circumstance at the cost of all else will lead one only to despair.
So a very good book overall!!
February 27, 2018
I don't get too many Korean books where I live, and when I see them I grab them. It's hard to be picky about the stuff. I perhaps overvalue them because of this, but there's something unique that happens in my head when I read in a different language. It's hard to describe, but I feel the place and the people more intensely. The smell and colors vibrantly come alive, and reading translations is often like looking through a slightly foggy window.
This short stories collection really did that for me. The South Korea that Pyun illustrates is like those slightly "off" photographs you might see from the old Victorian era. It's all real, there is nothing monstrous about it, but the way they never smile, the way their eyes are kind of glassy, gives off a sinister vibe that can't be shaken off. And this is the way Pyun writes about the downtrodden, tired working class of South Korea, living in the city lights, in a claustrophobic day to day schedule of family, kids, and work. They are like livestock, living in their kennels, like the title of the book suggests. They may seem like ordinary people living either complacent or ensnared lives, but once in a while the wild, grotesque reality becomes manifest, and this moment when nightmare enters everyday life for a small second is what Pyun focuses her lens on. It's kind of violent, maybe surreal. If the occasional flaws of logic and strange characters pushed me out of the pages once in a while, the rich darkness of the atmosphere pulled me back in.
This short stories collection really did that for me. The South Korea that Pyun illustrates is like those slightly "off" photographs you might see from the old Victorian era. It's all real, there is nothing monstrous about it, but the way they never smile, the way their eyes are kind of glassy, gives off a sinister vibe that can't be shaken off. And this is the way Pyun writes about the downtrodden, tired working class of South Korea, living in the city lights, in a claustrophobic day to day schedule of family, kids, and work. They are like livestock, living in their kennels, like the title of the book suggests. They may seem like ordinary people living either complacent or ensnared lives, but once in a while the wild, grotesque reality becomes manifest, and this moment when nightmare enters everyday life for a small second is what Pyun focuses her lens on. It's kind of violent, maybe surreal. If the occasional flaws of logic and strange characters pushed me out of the pages once in a while, the rich darkness of the atmosphere pulled me back in.
January 18, 2025
Hye-Young Pyun has wrangled some horrors of mundane despair in her collection To the Kennels and Other Stories, brought to English readers from the original Korean by translators Sora Kim-Russell and Heinz Insu Fenkl.
There are similar themes and imagery connecting these stories: wild animals in the city, angsty people caught in their routines, craving their patterns while also wanting to break free, needing to stay in them for economic reasons, needing to escape for emotional reasons. Humans are wearing animal masks, forced to smile and play fake instruments. The thematic connective tissue makes this book one animal. It births a meaningful collection rather than a coincidental collage of projects that happened to be done.
Sometimes horror is the fear of being trapped physically in a dark cave. Hye-Young Pyun’s stories are scary in a sad, disturbing way. Sometimes horror is the sadness of being trapped in cubicles like chicken coops, feeling pecks at your feet. Stuck in middle management in a mid-sized company. The only things keeping you going: financial necessity but also love for family and a weekly smile shared with friends.
Naturally—as with any short story collection—I liked some of the stories better than others. However, the story "Friday Hello" is a new all-time favorite of mine. I actually said “Wow” out loud when I finished this one. Perfect. A female author wrote the best description of adult male friendship I've ever read.
[I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review]
There are similar themes and imagery connecting these stories: wild animals in the city, angsty people caught in their routines, craving their patterns while also wanting to break free, needing to stay in them for economic reasons, needing to escape for emotional reasons. Humans are wearing animal masks, forced to smile and play fake instruments. The thematic connective tissue makes this book one animal. It births a meaningful collection rather than a coincidental collage of projects that happened to be done.
Sometimes horror is the fear of being trapped physically in a dark cave. Hye-Young Pyun’s stories are scary in a sad, disturbing way. Sometimes horror is the sadness of being trapped in cubicles like chicken coops, feeling pecks at your feet. Stuck in middle management in a mid-sized company. The only things keeping you going: financial necessity but also love for family and a weekly smile shared with friends.
Naturally—as with any short story collection—I liked some of the stories better than others. However, the story "Friday Hello" is a new all-time favorite of mine. I actually said “Wow” out loud when I finished this one. Perfect. A female author wrote the best description of adult male friendship I've ever read.
[I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review]
June 27, 2025
Hye-young Pyunin novellikokoelma jatkaa kirjailijan aiempien kirjojen tematiikkaa. Tunnelma on painostava ja jotain ikävää on juuri tapahtumaisillaan. Salaryman unohtaa tärkeät paperit metroon - mitä siitä seuraa? Eläimiä karkaa eläintarhasta ja pian niitä jahtaavat metsästäjät ovatkin todellinen uhka. Kinasteleva pariskunta matkaa autossa ja uhkaavasti ajava auto tuntuu seuraavan heitä jatkuvasti. Myös muissa novelleissa ihmiset ovat useimmiten epämiellyttäviä tai ikävässä tilanteessa. Jos todellisuus tuntuu jo tarpeeksi synkältä, nämä novellit eivät mieltä ainakaan paranna. Toisaalta ihailin päähenkilöiden sinnikkyyttä kaiken moskan keskellä, vaikka hetkittäin kaipasinkin jotain toivon pilkahdusta.
July 21, 2025
Really well-written, but bleak stories. From what I understand, this is the author’s style, but it didn’t speak to me. Almost every story detailed an oppressively dirty and mostly hopeless situation, and I do think that was the point, but I didn’t enjoy reading it.
December 21, 2024
I just didn't get it.
I could not figure out the meaning of the stories. They seemed dry and left me with the feeling I was clueless. Perhaps it's a cultural thing, but I've read other translations which I was able to comprehend.
Don't let my failure keep you from reading this if you're interested.
I could not figure out the meaning of the stories. They seemed dry and left me with the feeling I was clueless. Perhaps it's a cultural thing, but I've read other translations which I was able to comprehend.
Don't let my failure keep you from reading this if you're interested.
April 11, 2025
This collection of short stories is certainly not one I'd call enjoyable. In fact, each story left me feeling increasingly uneasy and despondent, and yet I kept going.
Why? The author absolutely nails Korean society's particular brand of stifling: strive, persist, and escape, for what's on the other side is always better. But at the end of the day, you will always be tethered to the confines of your kennel.
Although these themes are a perfect mirror to those portrayed in Parasite and Squid Game, I felt I was able to experience them much more vividly while journeying through the often bleak lives of the Korean working class.
Why? The author absolutely nails Korean society's particular brand of stifling: strive, persist, and escape, for what's on the other side is always better. But at the end of the day, you will always be tethered to the confines of your kennel.
Although these themes are a perfect mirror to those portrayed in Parasite and Squid Game, I felt I was able to experience them much more vividly while journeying through the often bleak lives of the Korean working class.
January 1, 2025
I didn't like any of these short stories, mainly because they were so depressing and/or the characters were so apathetic. I suspect that much of the underlying meanings were lost on me due to the different cultural perspectives.
March 7, 2025
The stories are dark and atmospheric. However, the endings leave you wanting more.
September 25, 2025
Not sure what this was, very depressing - it was written well, imagine like the most uncomfortable depressing situations written out over and over again, that’s what this is
November 25, 2025
Scared me. Truthful, nighmarish look into alientation and capitalism
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