I read this book without knowing much about it and few expectations. It was tagged vaguely as horror (body horror) and it was released this year. Since I wanted to read something “recent horror” for a while, I gave it a try.

The protagonist is an illegal immigrant to South Korea, and she has fled North Korea via China together with her mother and sister. The threat of being deported looms over her at all times. That setting alone is horrific, if only because it’s almost too real to be “fun” in the sense you want a horror story to be fun. The author is also of Korean descent (or so?), so this theme makes sense.

For better or worse, the story unfolds into something more surreal. I won’t go into details about the setting. It’s… convoluted. At times it can feel a bit contrived. At first it’s all mysterious, but towards the end when things are revealed, I found my suspension of disbelief stretched a bit too far. And I’m not talking about the fantastical elements here, just mundane things that don’t quite fit together.

Anyways.

Aviary switches between two first-person narrators, but the second one has less pages (thankfully). The first protagonist is incredibly paranoid, but that’s understandable given her background. She’s also a pragmatic person and all in all fun to read and easy to identify with. The second protagist is, uhm .. I guess “co-dependent” is the right word? She’s being manipulated by a man to an infuriating degree. But on top of this, the prose in her chapters becomes overly melodramatic and filled with metaphors that are either arbitrary or over the top. Probably this was intentional, because the first protagonist’s prose isn’t like this. The one metaphor I still can’t get over is “my throat is the sahara”. She musters up some resolve, plans to confront her ex-husband, but when he shows her the tiniest bit of respect she swoons and her throat becomes the sahara.

As I said, it was probably intentional by the author. In a way it does a good job to portray this sort of lopsided relationship and the unstable personality of the protagonist. At the same time, just like when someone near you seems to be manipulated and lead around on a leash, it can be really frustrating.