From the Shirley Jackson Award–winning author of The Hole, a Kafkaesque tale of crime and punishment hailed by Korea's Wall Street Journal as "an airtight masterpiece."
Distinguished for his talents as a rat killer, the nameless protagonist of Hye-young Pyun's City of Ash and Red is sent by the extermination company he works for on an extended assignment in C, a country descending into chaos and paranoia, swept by a contagious disease, and flooded with trash. No sooner does he disembark than he is whisked away by quarantine officials and detained overnight. Isolated and forgotten, he realizes that he is stranded with no means of contacting the outside world. Still worse, when he finally manages to reach an old friend, he is told that his ex-wife's body was found in his apartment and he is the prime suspect. Barely managing to escape arrest, he must struggle to survive in the streets of this foreign city gripped with fear of contamination and reestablish contact with his company and friends in order to clear his reputation.
But as the man's former life slips further and further from his grasp, and he looks back on his time with his wife, it becomes clear that he may not quite be who he seems. From the bestselling author of The Hole, City of Ash and Red is an apocalyptic account of the destructive impact of fear and paranoia on people's lives as well as a haunting novel about a man's loss of himself and his humanity.
From the Shirley Jackson Award–winning author of The Hole, a Kafkaesque tale of crime and punishment hailed by Korea's Wall Street Journal as "an airtight masterpiece."
Distinguished for his talents as a rat killer, the nameless protagonist of Hye-young Pyun's City of Ash and Red is sent by the extermination company he works for on an extended assignment in C, a country descending into chaos and paranoia, swept by a contagious disease, and flooded with trash. No sooner does he disembark than he is whisked away by quarantine officials and detained overnight. Isolated and forgotten, he realizes that he is stranded with no means of contacting the outside world. Still worse, when he finally manages to reach an old friend, he is told that his ex-wife's body was found in his apartment and he is the prime suspect. Barely managing to escape arrest, he must struggle to survive in the streets of this foreign city gripped with fear of contamination and reestablish contact with his company and friends in order to clear his reputation.
But as the man's former life slips further and further from his grasp, and he looks back on his time with his wife, it becomes clear that he may not quite be who he seems. From the bestselling author of The Hole, City of Ash and Red is an apocalyptic account of the destructive impact of fear and paranoia on people's lives as well as a haunting novel about a man's loss of himself and his humanity.
Critiques-
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September 10, 2018
This disturbing, Kafkaesque tale from Pyun (The Hole) charts the career of an unnamed man from an unnamed country, who has been “a product developer at a pest control firm” that specializes in rats—a Sisyphean task, given that many rodents survive any efforts at eradication. For an obscure reason, the man is transferred to Country C, where he’s detained by health inspectors concerned about a new virus that has been spreading like wildfire globally. When he’s finally released, he finds that his new lodgings are in District 4, an island built on a landfill, whose streets are filled with trash. The man’s luggage, which included most of his possessions, is stolen, and his boss tells him not to report to work, pending an internal company review that will take over a week. The parallels between the man’s new life and the lives of rats are a bit heavy-handed, and once Pyun reveals that the man has committed marital rape, some readers will lose interest in his fate. Still, those with a taste for creepy suspense will be rewarded. -
September 15, 2018
A man's new job in an unfamiliar country becomes a fast descent into a psychological and literal version of hell.An unnamed man in an unidentified time frame is sent to Country C to work a high-level extermination job. He immediately finds that his new home is barely survivable: The street is overrun with vermin and garbage, stink pervades the air, his job is suddenly postponed, and his only suitcase is stolen as soon as he hits town. He receives no explanation, and nobody there or at home is looking out for his welfare. Meanwhile, the city's been overtaken by a deadly virus, about which nobody seems to know the exact causes or symptoms. Then things really start to go wrong. Once he manages to connect with someone back home, he learns that his ex-wife was murdered on his departure day and that he is the prime suspect. When police arrive at his lodging, he escapes through a window and must now live in the sewers with the homeless, knowing that anyone suspected of having the virus is likely to be incinerated. In flashbacks he relives his troubled marriage for clues of how he got there. Pyun leave one big hole in the plot (if there is news media, why does the man not know what awaits him in Country C?), and she robs the story of political resonance by not describing how the world got to the state it's in.As a story of one man's struggle to maintain sanity against the odds, it's both consistently gripping and consistently bleak.COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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October 15, 2018
The first collaboration between Pyun and translator Kim-Russell, The Hole? (2017), introduced one of Korea's most lauded writers to Anglophone readers. Kim-Russell's ability to replicate Pyun's stifling terror repeats here as he presents a nameless antihero, known only as the man. Leaving behind envious fellow employees, he's transferred to Country C to work at the main office of a pest-extermination company. Detained overnight at the airport for being a potential health risk in a nation already plagued by a deadly virus, the man finally arrives at his prearranged apartment in a district built over a reclaimed landfill, which is oozing with filthy waste. His suitcase is stolen, including his phone, which severs any connections to his previous life. His attempt to find someone to release the dog he abandoned at home sets in motion a fugitive's odyssey marked by murder, park-bench wars, sewer hideaways, and rats. Stripped of identity, language, and ethics, the cost of survival for Pyun's protagonist proves to be his very humanity. A slap-in-the-face parable of the perils of society's failures, Pyun's suffocating tale reveals a future all too possible and real.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.) -
Publishers Weekly
"Kafkaesque . . . Those with a taste for creepy suspense will be rewarded."
- Booklist "Kim-Russell's ability to replicate Pyun's stifling terror repeats here . . . Stripped of identity, language, and ethics, the cost of survival for Pyun's protagonist proves to be his very humanity. A slap-in-the-face parable of the perils of society failures. Pyun's suffocating tale reveals a future all too possible and real."
- Books and Bao> "In this tautly knit novel by a brilliant stylist, a world of darkness you'd never want to encounter in real life unfolds mysteriously before your eyes. Soon you'll find yourself gripped by the fear that what the protagonist experiences could happen to you. Yet, captivated by the enthralling writing and brutal imaginings, you won't be able to put the book down until you've experienced its darkness to the very end."
- Signal Horizon "In the tradition of Kafka, Camus, and Murakami, Pyun takes us on an unflinching, intensely visceral journey through the dark and nightmarish underbelly of our mundane world."
- Evilcyclist's Blog "As a story of one man's struggle to maintain sanity against the odds, it's. . . consistently gripping."
- The Modern Novel "A story of loss so affecting that it borders on existential vertigo."
- A Bookish Type "City of Ash and Red is a tale of survival and ruin that leaves no room for even a single drop of comfort to seep in. Pyun builds an airtight masterpiece of agony and mystery with her masterfully crafted sentences, and she colors it with the ash-gray of ruin and the fiery red of life."
- Kyung-sook Shin, Man Asian Prize–winning author of Please Look After Mom and The Court Dancer "A story of modern humanity's survival and downfall as told through the tale of a man who finds his life ruined for reasons he doesn't understand, in a city rife with disease, soiled by trash, and teeming with rats. When asked if it wasn't painful to write about such a dark world, Pyun replied, 'I get asked that a lot, but in fact I delight in images of elaborate destruction. I can savor the tension and work towards unraveling it.' The delight that Pyun speaks of is the same that her readers feel. The source of that delight is the novel's dark aesthetic and use of tension like a discordant note that jangles the nerves to keep the reader hooked all the way to the last page."
- Heinz Insu Fenkl, author of the PEN/Hemingway Award finalist Memories of My Ghost Brother "Hye-young Pyun has made a name for herself in literature with her exquisite depictions of a world of strange and grotesque imagination. . . . In City of Ash and Red, the central motifs are contagion and rats. . . . Though the world she describes is a fictional one, the story of the extinction and denial of a weak man who must persevere within that world feels all too real. Perhaps this unpleasant sense of reality comes from the realization that our own world is stranger than the monstrous one that Pyun invents, that we ourselves are no stronger than rats. But what can we do? Just as the powerless protagonist must somehow survive in the unknown space of Country C, we too have no choice but to persevere no matter what life throws at us."
- Kirkus Reviews "Like Hitchcock or Abe, Pyun peers head on into the unnerving depths of human grief with the most methodical of eye, logically narrating our descent into such a clear, uncanny terror we hope to remind ourselves its only just a book, one wound from end to end with an exquisite magic that refuses to let go."
- Sunyoung Park, associate professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Gender Studies, USC "While reading The Hole, you'll find yourself suddenly doubting everything. Pyun is asking us a tough and terrifying question that none can dodge: Is your life safe?"
- Munhwa Ilbo "By the time Hye-young Pyun's taut psychological thriller The Hole has tightened its grip on the unsuspecting mind, it's too late to escape. The shadows lurking in the novel become manifest, and dark poetic justice reigns. . . . The Hole is an unshakable novel about the unfathomable depths of human need."
- Kukmin Ilbo "Winner of many of Korea's top literary prizes and accolades, Pyun proves to be an effectively chilling storyteller whose expert narrative manipulations should earn new followers."
- Blake Butler, author of 300,000,000 "Fissures in life offer a glimpse of the truth that starts not from others but from us and...
