Walking Practice

November 28, 2022
Min probes themes such as gender and otherness in this provocative if clunky story of an alien trapped on Earth. The unnamed and ungendered narrator, the lone survivor of an attack on their planet, is stranded on Earth with no way of getting home. To cope with their isolation and hunger, they painfully transform their alien body to look human, then engage in random hookups. After sex, they kill and eat their lovers. Throughout this process, they struggle both physically (forcing their body to conform to human standards) and mentally (the repressed guilt of killing to survive). As an outsider, their labor to replicate human traits provides an opportunity for soliloquies about the gender binary and the ways it’s policed (“You, dear reader, must be curious about my gender.... Or you might have scraped together clues from what I’ve said and how I’ve said it, constructing my gender to your own design”). Underneath, the narrator aches with a desire for connection. Abstract illustrations by Min hint at the narrator’s private bodily state, and clever changes in the formatting indicate whether the narrator is in their natural or human form. Though the prose is sometimes stilted, the narrator’s earnest struggles with loneliness feel genuine. Despite some missteps, this is worth a look.

March 30, 2023
The alien--unnamed until the final page--calls it "work": app-enabled hookup sex (usually) followed by vicious consumption. In the 15 years since they've been Earthbound as the only known survivor from their decimated home planet, they've learned to transform into approximations of their would-be lovers' exact desires. Each incarnation takes ""walking practice"" to be convincing. Human flesh is the only way to satiate their multilayered hunger. Unrelenting loneliness keeps them hunting. Don't ignore the kilometer-chapter titles. Min, a pseudonym, pours each of his identities into this strange, disturbing debut as writer (a genre-defying renegade), artist (his black-and-white line drawings regularly interrupt the text), and model (he's expertly aware of ideal bodies in perfected movement). Originally self-published, the novel was then picked up by a major Korean publisher after generating a cult following. Translator Caudle is superbly inventive, brilliantly adapting Min's unconventional visual manipulations of the original Korean, despite "the limitations of how English is written." An alien protagonist may signal sf/speculative fiction, but the dark narrative screams a primal now- with body distortions, screen-enabled isolation, social media, queerphobia, and disability discrimination on every page.

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Starred review from February 1, 2023
An alien arrives on Earth, hungry for love. The narrator of Min's dark satire, first published in South Korea in 2017, is a shape-shifting alien who crash-landed here 15 years ago. In that time, it's sampled all sorts of sustenance on our planet, but only human flesh truly satisfies. So it uses dating apps (username: Hunting4luv) to quell its cravings for sex and sustenance. It's hard work, morphing into attractive male or female forms--Earth's gravity keeps threatening to make its body "puff up like bread in an oven." And sometimes its prey proves elusive, refusing to sit still to have their heads bitten off, their blood sucked completely. But it's all worth it: "If you throw the heart, lungs, entrails, and other organs together and boil them in a pot, it's a killer stew," it winkingly notes. It's easy to identify Min's real-world targets: online dating, body image, gender identity, and the literal alienation of everyday life. But Min's version of a fish out of water is still entertaining and surprising. That's partly because the alien offers an extreme outsider take on courtship and gender rituals. ("To act the part of a woman, you've got to memorize a hefty script. Men should do the opposite. Just don't act like a woman.") Also, Min deploys a brand of sardonic humor--ably conveyed via Caudle's translation--that would be a poor fit for a more realistic novel. (The book is also interspersed with abstract drawings by Min that seem to suggest the creature's true, squishy form.) Despite its murderousness, the narrator is a remarkably sympathetic character. Its laments are ours, especially when we seek connection: "I am beholden to my body's every demand. Dear reader, this is how I live." A slim, sui generis allegory on romance and its discontents.

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