Walking Practice: A Novel (2022) by Dolki Min

American cover art for the English translation of Walking Practice: A Novel (2022) by Dolki Min.

 Book Review

Walking Practice: A Novel (2022)

by Dolki Min

Translated by Victoria Caudle

   I picked this title out of the Sunday New York Times book review- it's translated from the Korean, it's a literary fiction/science fiction/body horror/lgbtq themed book about a horrific alien who has crash landed on planet Earth and is forced to subsist... on humans.  Specifically, eating humans that they(yes, this is a book about gender issue) find on dating apps, both men and women.  The creature/narrator can assume human form, though it is a real effort- it sounds like having to hold some kind of weight lifting pose for hours on end and the book is just a couple days in the life of this creature as it goes about its extremely nasty business, which is described in clear prose a la American Psycho.

  At 144 pages Walking Practice: A Novel is a quick read.  There are some typographical shenanigans that have to do with the translation and the idea of an alien narrator, but it wasn't that difficult to follow.  There also line drawings of the creature in its hideous, natural form, sprinkled throughout the text as full, additional pages.