Nature is not all good. Especially in this remote region where the forest seems to be at one with the darkness. Park In-su, a man hired to stop visitors from entering, has the impression that the forest is watching his every move. At all hours of the day and night, he hears it like a nagging whisper that exhausts and weakens him. When he moved in the village below the mountain with his wife Yu-jin and son Se-oh, he thought he was putting his violent behavior and alcohol issues behind him. One time, after drinking too much, he injured his little boy after throwing him against the wall. Since then, Se-oh has been unable to bear being alone with him. But in this village, home to the many forest lumberjacks, there’s not much to do in the off-season beside getting drunk. 

      A stranger soon upsets the village’s dull routine. Lee Ha-in is a lawyer whose estranged older brother has disappeared. Convinced that his brother had been working as a forest ranger before In-su replaced him, Ha-in has arrived in an attempt to track him down. After the opening scene—a masterful conversation between Ha-in and In-su—we are introduced to the villagers as Ha-in encounters them one by one to show them a photo of his brother. They all deny recognizing him. Thanks to the omniscient narrator, the reader knows that none of them are telling the truth. Yet they can’t betray the forest. They all know it would never forgive them. 

      After reading Hye-young Pyun’s The Owl Cries, walking through a dark forest will become an anxious task. The reader will also be aptly reminded of the iconic line from David Lynch’s TV series Twin Peaks: “The owls are not what they seem.” In this novel, when owls hoot, misfortune strikes. When In-su discovers the phrase, “In the forest the owl lives!” written in a notebook left by one of his predecessors, he initially finds it absurd (of course an owl lives in the forest, it’s its natural habitat!). But how can the reader trust In-su? His drinking causes visual and auditory hallucinations, and he feels as if he’s slipping into a parallel world. Is his house as strange as he thinks? Is that old stain on the wooden staircase really blood? Why does the padlock on the gate open onto the forest instead of the courtyard? And what’s lurking in the basement that Yu-jin keeps locked?

      In Pyun’s novels, redemption is rare for those who have failed in life. A master at creating stifling atmospheres, the writer seems to have a predilection for losers who struggle with forces beyond their control. While her plots are most often set in cities (haunted by the threat of an epidemic, as in Dans l’antre d’Aoï Garden (tr. Jeongmin Domissy-Lee, 2015), or destroyed by an earthquake, as in City of Ash and Red (tr. Lim Yeong-hee and Françoise Nagel, 2012), the natural elements are a perfect fit with her dark, desperate universe. Marked by unflinching honesty, her writing is not gentle with any of the characters, just like nature. 

      Pyun imagines a forest that swallows up those who enter it, turning it into a metaphor for human society. During his search, Ha-in learns that his brother is far from being the only one to have disappeared in this strange land. Because of the arduousness of their work, lumberjacks vanish from one day to the next, as if the forest had swallowed them up. The toxicity of human relationships is no match for the harshness of the environment. As a metaphor for the human community, the forest oppresses all those who come near it, and individualism stems naturally from the frustrations and domination of the strongest over the weakest. The Owl Cries is one of those stories that leaves you with no illusions about the human race, and allows you to understand why some people might prefer animals to their own kind. 

Laëtitia Favro

Literary Critic for Le Point, Lire, and Livres Hebdo