If you like rats, trash and sewers, this book is for you. Otherwise it is a waste of time. It felt like nothing really happened and there was no story. Just an unnamed man in a disgusting city during a pandemic.

Very strange book. No real plot or explanation of why things were happening. Not my cup of tea right now, but I may come back and reread this one if only to try to understand it a little better.

This was a very strange book, but I don’t mean that as a criticism. In a way I think that the blurb gives away too much and it might be better to read it after you have read the book. The unnamed protagonist, referred to only as “the man”, is sent for management training to the home office of his extermination company, based in his skill at killing rats. The home office is in another country, called C, that is in the grips of a contagious and sometimes fatal disease and a general breakdown of society. The man knows no one, has limited language skills, does not seem to have been expected by his home office and soon finds himself homeless. The air is filled with fumigant and the ashes of burning garbage and corpses. “And he grew unhappy at the thought that he might never again run his fingers along the fine grain of ordinary everyday life.” However, as we experience this post apocalyptic world through the point of view of the man, there are hints that perhaps he was always isolated and that the outward manifestations of chaos and coldness in C were just a reflection of the man’s inner state.

This book is very well written and comparing its vibe to Kafka is not far fetched. The rat killing was pretty gross, but I suppose it was necessary. I would like to read more by this author.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

There are so many interesting novels coming out of Korea at the moment – challenging established tropes across a range of genres. Just this year there has been the psychothriller The Good Son, the anti-hero crime drama The Plotters and Toward Dusk, another masterpiece of introspection and history from Hwang Sok Yong. Into this mix comes what could be described as dystopian existentialist horror -The City of Ash and Red by Hwe-Young Pyun. A kafkaesque descent into a nightmare world that, in some strange way, has echoes of all of the books and authors previously mentioned. As with many of those books, also, this has been translated by Sora Kim Russell.

An unnamed man is taken out of the immigration queue at the airport. He is sick and may well be infected with a virus that is potentially a pandemic. The man has come to Country Y to work, transferred by his company. But when he is taken to his apartment, on an island groaning under the weight of uncollected garbage, it turns out that perhaps there may not be a job for him after all. Before he can do much about that his whole apartment block is put under quarantine. From there things go from bad to worse.

Pyun creates a nightmare-scape in an almost post-apocalyptic landscape. But the apocalypse, if there ever was one, never quite arrives. Instead this is one man’s descent from office worker, to vagrant living in a garbage dump, to a literal and figurative descent even lower. As in Kafka, the rules are never quite clear and just as the man works them out he finds he is on the wrong side of them. And there may be a story of redemption here except that when things look like they might be turning around they take an even darker turn.

City of Ash and Red is not an easy read. The protagonist, despite his plight is not particularly likeable, in fact in some respects he is completely unlikeable. And the rat-infested world in which he finds himself is nasty and brutish. As noted, these aspects have emerged in other recent Korean fiction. The Good Son was also hinged around an extremely unlikeable main character. Hwang Sok-Yong’s Familiar Things, while much more optimistic and heart-felt, was set in and around a garbage dump where a young boy grows up as a “picker”. Buy Pyun, with deadpan language and a nightmarish atmosphere, heightens these aspects.

City of Ash and Red is not for everyone. Parts of it recall the bleakness of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. But while Pyun toys with an apocalyptic scenario she never quite gets there, managing to twist the narrative into something else entirely by the book’s shocking, but in some ways inevitable, conclusion.

Sometimes you read and love a book, but when you have to explain it to someone, you fumble for words.

This is one of those books. In City of Ash and Red, we have a pandemic. It's a quiet one, but a deadly one. Our main character, who remains nameless, is promoted, but that promotion takes into a country beset by disease - a country where he knows no one and can barely speak the language. Once there, he discovers that his ex-wife (back home) has been murdered...and he is the prime suspect.

But what we have here isn't a murder mystery. Instead, as our nameless character escapes into the city, we have a bleak and horrifying apocalypse - and the story of a lost stranger for whom nothing is familiar dealing with horrors beyond belief.

The writing is sparse and surreal. The reader is as much a stranger here as is our narrator.

Readers should note that the end isn't quite as concrete as one might like. But it works well for the book and the reader ends up feeling like they've experienced some horrific yet amorphous journey.

Well worth the read.

*ARC Provided via Net Galley

I can't tell if this was supposed to be dismal or absurdist or both. A nameless male protagonist whose work centers around killing pests is sent to work in a similarly unnamed city far from home, where society has crumbled and the city is filled with trash and pestilence. The protagonist should get no sympathy, however, as he's an admitted rapist and abuser, and as his life and the meaning in it spiral away, well, I cared less and less. I think on the surface this is a metaphor for inhumanity, and on a deeper level suggests that everyone is capable of violence. Content warning for rape and other violence.

With its existential and labyrinthine feel, this book reminds me of Kafka, Murakami, Kobo Abe and other great authors. The unnamed main character in this story accepts a transfer to a new position in “Country C.” Yet, there seems to be some confusion once he is there. The management at his new post seems to not have expected him. He doesn’t speak the language so he cannot figure out what the confusion is, or why the streets are covered in trash, how the highly contagious illness that is going around is contracted, and what the men all over in hazmat suits are spraying. An immigrant thrown into a completely foreign situation, he tries to gain an understanding of what exactly is happening. This was an engaging read that keeps poking at deeper significance of the man’s experience.

This is the type of book that left me sitting there going, what the hell did I just read? And don't get me wrong, that's my favourite kind of book. Even days after finishing, I’m thinking about the book and seriously considering rereading it. It’s an interesting combination of dystopian and horror with a very kafkaesque coating. It works brilliantly, because of how well the tone of the book works with the content.

The unnamed protagonist is in an impossible situation, and it just keeps getting worse. The tension brought on by his dire situation made it hard to put the book down. Even when the darker aspects of the man’s life are revealed, I found myself completely invested in his story, though I’ll admit I was sort of cheering when shit just kept raining on him (not literally, though… in this book… you never know.) The one thing that made this book so hard to put down was the grotesque interest I had in the world, and the lack of certainty I had about anything I had read. I didn’t trust anything and I’m still sitting here wondering what the fuck actually happened.

I’d recommend this book to anyone who has read and enjoys Kafka, or anyone who is looking for something uncomfortably bizarre and wants to read about killing rats and drowning in garbage. Overall, it’s definitely a book that will leave you thinking and mildly uncomfortable. Bravo.

I was a bit ambivalent from the outset as to whether this book would work for me, but decided to give it a go. Unfortunately, I found it very hard to get into and also didn't find myself sympathising with the protagonist at all, which then meant I didn't really get invested in what happened to him. This lack of sympathy increased as the book went on, to the point where I gave up about a third of the way through - when he talks about leaving his dog behind and thinking 'oh, it'll survive a few more days without food', I really lost any sympathy I had for him.

Not my cup of tea, I'm afraid!

The unnamed narrator is known for his talents as a rat killer. The extermination company he works for has given him what many consider to be a promotion and is sent to Country C. However, when the man gets to Country C, he finds its streets are overrun with rats and piled high with rotting garbage with horrible odors. There’s also a deadly rampant virus going around and men walk around in hazmat suits. When he finds out that his new job has been postponed, he thinks things can’t get any worse. But his world completely caves in when he contacts someone from home and finds out that his ex-wife has been murdered and he’s the prime suspect.

Wow, this author surely knows how to write a gruesome story and keep her readers on edge! Her imagination knows no limits and the world she has created in this book in a bleak, horrendous one. I was very impressed with her book, “The Hole”, but this one is even better with a more involved plot. The book has many layers and I think different people will read different meanings into it. I see that “The Hole” has won the 2017 Shirley Jackson Award and I can see why. Her work does remind me of Shirley Jackson’s plus it has that unique Korean touch that I’ve grown to admire.

Recommended.

I thought I'd take a chance on this one and give a Korean science fiction book a chance. I can usually forgive a different approach to writing a story and all the little nuances that come with it when trying something like this. In this case it just didn't work for me. Don't let that keep you from giving it a shot, though.

Major kudos to both the author and translator for crafting such a compelling tale full of unease and disorientation. City of Ash and Red is one of the far superior modern novels with a dystopian theme I've read in a long time. Perhaps that is due to the fact that the setting is not the true focus of the book, but compliments the main story with nightmarish and nauseating imagery throughout.

A brilliantly unsettling and subtle horror story with a unforgettable protagonist.

With thanks to Netgalley and Skyhorse for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

City of Ash and Red is a Korean story that strikes fear and uneasiness into the reader. The unnamed lead character and narrator works for an extermination company. He's not the best employee but gets to work at the big office in Country C. Countries and cities are represented by single letters which are not shorthand but signify places unknown to the reader. The reader will not think that country C is North Korea, Poland, or Canada; it is someplace the reader has never been. There is a sense of being lost and to compound that feeling the character also feels lost and disoriented. He loses all contact with his home country. He also learns he is suspected in the murder of his ex-wife. The book takes the reader on a dark, twisting course. In a city where trash piles high, rats thrive, and swirling mists of sprays that are supposed to control the spread of an epidemic cover everything a foreigner must find his way out or in.


Translator Sora Kim-Russell does an outstanding job in translating the story to English while keeping the original feel and intent of the story. Horror seems to have different flavors in different cultures. Part of the stories appeal is that is outside of the Western or American norm.

The beginning of Hye-young Pyun’s novel, City of Ash and Red, (translated by Sora Kim-Russell), terrified me because it presents one of my worst fears. An unnamed man arrives in a foreign city to take up a job, only to end up without his phone, documents, most of his possessions, and eventually the apartment his new employer set up. He doesn’t speak the language well. All the phone numbers he might call were stored in his phone. He’s on his own. Meanwhile, an epidemic and a garbage strike are making conditions in the city district he’s fetched up in downright hellish.

At first, I felt a strong sympathy for our unnamed protagonist. He’s in desperate straights in the first chapters, especially as the epidemic gets worse and he is quarantined to his apartment. But then, I started to learn things about the protagonist that flipped my sympathy on its head. Throughout the first chapters, the protagonist alternately laments and puzzles about his broken marriage and how his wife left him for a man he doesn’t like. But when the protagonist does manage to call home after an arduous phone directory search, we learn that not only is his ex-wife’s dog brutally murdered in the protagonist’s apartment, so his his ex-wife.

The hits keep coming after that. The protagonist is visited by police officers and jumps out a window to escape, becoming homeless. While the protagonist digs through trash for edible food and scraps for a park bench to sleep on, more is revealed about his violent outbursts. The early chapters lead us to think that the protagonist is a put-upon, quietly suffering man. The rest of the book shows us the lie, complete with shocking examples of what happens when he loses his temper.

The wheel of Fortune lifts and drops the protagonist more than once in City of Ash and Red. So much so, that it’s hard to know what to make of the story. On the one hand, it would be easy to read the novel as a version of a man’s justifiable descent into hell for his deeds. On the other, the ending doesn’t make sense in that reading because the protagonist’s luck seems to be on the rise. City of Ash and Red left me feel angry for the way the protagonist repeatedly escapes justice. I suppose that’s the question this book presents for me. Is there an amount of suffering that could make amends? If not, what is a fitting punishment? Can suffering and deprivation even be considered a punishment if the sufferer thinks they’ve escaped justice?

Longtime readers of this blog will know that these are the kinds of questions that fascinate me in literature. It’s entirely possible that other readers will get something completely different from City of Ash and Red. Every reader, I think, will be unsettled by the strange city where the story takes place and the even more unsettling revelations about the protagonist. Kim-Russell, the translator, preserves the way Pyun withholds names and identifying details from us so that this city and this protagonist could be anywhere and anyone. Because this story could take place anywhere with any number of abusive characters standing in for the protagonist, the novel is just that much more chilling.

All at once like The Road, this book takes the reader by storm. There are notes of Kafka and Saramago here, while also unique in its own right.

Recommended reading for those who enjoy literary dystopian fiction (and I do).