A review by dembury
The Hive and the Honey by Paul Yoon

2.0

Objectively I can acknowledge the historical hauntedness that runs through these stories and appreciate the exploration of the Korean diaspora, but at the same time I’m going to acknowledge that Yoon’s writing is so deeply flat and stiff that I was bored shitless most of the time reading this. This man must hate adjectives and sentence structure variation because his prose is downright monotone. For veryyyyy brief moments, that tone amplifies a portion of a story, but then immediately it just becomes dull again.
Every single one of the stories also has the same style ending, almost a trailing-off of the voice that just…ends.
“At the Post Station” is the strongest work in this collection, but even that ultimately felt unfinished.