cover image House of Twilight

House of Twilight

Yun Heung-Gil, Gil Yun Heung. Readers International, $9.95 (233pp) ISBN 978-0-930523-60-2

The seven works of short fiction that form this potent English-language debut by a South Korean introduce a people dislocated physically, politically and psychologically by civil war. The child narrator of ``The Rainy Spell'' understands little of Communism or revolution, but receives a painful education in loyalty, betrayal, love and grief as political differences within his family culminate in the death of a relative. Fears of treachery and turbulence linger after war has ended, as the landlord in title is correct/pk ``The Man Who Was Left as Nine Pairs of Shoes'' is asked by a policeman to monitor a tenant and report his activities ``when he does something a little out of the ordinary.'' Even the self becomes a stranger, an object of suspicion: in ``Gang Beating'' characters file past a mirror in which ``you would unexpectedly find your other self . . . who would look larger or even fatter than you or grotesquely uglier.'' Occasional leadenness afflicts the style (``Rain enveloped the pitch darkness like a dripping-wet mop''); on the whole, however, the language is wrenching in its plainness. (Sept.)