A book club book! And a good one for spooky season: this is a collection of ghost stories that kind of coalesce into a novel that's based around the Institute, which we learn stores haunted items. Each story connects to an item in some way, either its origin or a family or person who has been haunted by them, and then by the end of the story we see one of the ways the Institute handles those items.
This collection is originally written in Korean (translated by Anton Hur), and I love reading works set outside the U.S. and getting a feel for a different culture, with very different unspoken cultural expectations and standards. Some of the ghost stories felt as much like folk stories as hauntings, and while some of them involved women suffering, a lot of them were about women getting revenge or breaking free of terrible male relatives, and that was very satisfying. There's also a lovely story centered around a gay character in a tunnel that never ends, and how he escapes it really worked for me. I am definitely going to keep my eye out for other work by this author in the future.
Grade: A
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