Do you like weird? Run (with practice) don't walk for this one. It's beautifully weird.

Walking Practice by Dolki Min (translated by Victoria Caudle), follows a shapeshifting alien who crash lands in Korea, the novel drops us into the story 10 years later as the alien, Mumu, narrates their day to day battle for survival to us the reader. This survival involves hunting for humans to eat via dating apps and some post-coital cannibalism - praying mantis style. Visceral, darkly humorous, no filter, grotesquely descriptive - just some of the words I’d use to describe this 160 page novel. It is a refreshingly raw commentary on queer identity, disability, survival, human experience, and connection. I also have to mention the translation which is sublime, the style of writing and narration from the alien MC must have been such a challenge to translate but Victoria Caudle pulled it off magnificently. Oh and the author also did the cover art and the illustrations throughout the book - an incredible debut novel and I will definitely be picking up any future books! Thank you to Harper Collins for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review.

Walking Practice is literary sci-fi horror and I absolutely loved it. It's about an alien living on Earth after its spaceship crash-lands and its planet is destroyed. The alien enjoys hooking up with unsuspecting humans and afterwards it... well, you can find out the gory details for yourself. There's some commentary on the human condition from the alien's POV, which is really interesting. If you enjoy Sayaka Murata's darker novels, then you'll love this.

Walking Practice is the first ever translated fiction by Korean writer Dolki Min. I heard a lot about it through social media by its translator Victoria Caudle and was very curious to dive into this queer world that the author provides us. The story follows Mumu (if I remember well their name), an alien that landed on Earth after their spaceship crashed there and their planet was destroyed by enemies. For more than a decade already, Mumu tries to fit Korean society and survives by undertaking a business in the dating market. What do they do? They arrange daily meetings with young people hungry for love and sex and give them the flesh they want before murdering and eating them. It is a simple game of survival that proved to be more efficient than Mumu's previous routine--that is, eating animal meat and other human food. Human flesh fills their craving. But human flesh also reminds Mumu about their loneliness and their wish to have more than that. What Mumu craves the most is affection and belonging, and their lovers all fail to give them. I really love this novel. It was a short read, so very quick to read, and the audiobook made the reading experience even more special because the narrator's acting was absolutely wonderful! The tonal changes rendered the humour perfectly well when it appears, so much so that I surprised myself laughing a lot. Really, if there is one thing that I'll remember about this book, it is the humour and sarcasm in it. Besides, I am always keen to read more queer Korean fiction, only to observe the subtleties encompassed in the writing and understand how queerness is perceived in Korea. I feel that this book quite explicitly clarifies that it is still something taboo. The physical change Mumu undergoes every single day to comply with the physical preferences of each lover is striking in laying out the importance of beauty standards and expectations, for women as well as men. Men and women who are too curvy or showing signs of obesity, for instance, are left on the margins of the dating market while those who are deemed too beautiful are flooded with dirty messages from people hungry for sex. In my eyes, the constant physical transformation of Mumu's body also suggests how much trans people feel the pressure to hide, blend in, and avoid others' attention. The fatigue Mumu recounts is endless and demonstrates the difficulties to feel included in a society which does everything needed to erase them. Mumu feels obliged to always calculate their every move, from the way they move in the streets to the concentration needed to keep face in the subway, or even how to speak politely to elderly people who are persistently rude to their face. So you see, Mumu's humour must be deciphered most of the time; it always buries something deeper and more serious that, later on, births an outburst or a sort of crisis in the alien. There would be too many things to speak about this book, so I am going to stop there and finish by saying that I reallllly encourage people to read it. It is bold in the writing AND translation, it is thought-provoking, funny, QUEER, and I just am sure that this will speak to many readers out there.

This book is fantastic, it's gory, visceral and emotional. The narrator is an alien working their way through human life, the descriptions of their body and the ever challenging form they possess when human is so tangible I thought I could not only see but feel their body. Not for the light hearted but would absolutely encourage anyone who likes body horror, psychological thrillers and science fiction to give this a read.