FLOWERS OF MOLD & OTHER STORIES

In even the most mundane lives, spectacular and shocking things
can happen.

This is a collection of 10 unsettling short stories by Korean
author Ha (Traversing Afternoon,
2017), one of the new wave of Korean women writers, thoughtfully translated by
Hong. Ha has a gift for infusing elements of the fantastic into her tales of
unremarkable people. Her protagonists are housewives, schoolgirls, and
seemingly bland office workers whose daily lives eventually veer off into the
surreal, the macabre, or the downright bizarre. Like those of the American
auteur David Lynch, Ha’s characters seem to exist in another dimension. As
these stories unfold, things become more surreal and eccentric. In the title
story, “Flowers of Mold,” the hero, or maybe antihero, is a man who
meticulously searches through his neighbors’ garbage bags looking for clues to
their lives and personalities. His fervor goes up a notch when he becomes
obsessed with his next-door neighbor and her ex-boyfriend. “Waxen Wings” is a
modern retelling of the tale of Icarus, the boy who flew too close to the sun,
from the perspective of a former female gymnast. She longs to fly but grows too
tall to compete and finds a much more extreme alternative. “Your Rearview
Mirror” is the story of a department store security guard’s obsession with a
pretty female customer who he eventually discovers has more than one dark
secret. “The Woman Next Door” begins with a polite request to borrow a spatula
and ends in a spiral of jealousy, shoplifting, and possibly madness. Even
though this is a book of short stories, it’s definitely a page-turner, as
readers encounter one strange, unsettling saga after another, always wondering,
“What can possibly happen now?”