Walking Practice

Stranded on Earth after crash-landing their spacecraft, a shapeshifting alien is disabled by the planet's punishing gravity and driven by a single, relentless need: to eat. And on Earth, the most convenient prey is people. To hunt, the alien takes on whatever human form a target desires, using dating apps to lure victims to their deaths and a grim kit of tools to do the rest.

But when a kill goes wrong, the careful rhythm of survival begins to fall apart, sending the alien on a frantic, painful flight across the city and into an unexpected reckoning with its own body, its hunger, and the strange, stubborn will of the humans it consumes.

Dolki Min's debut — translated from the Korean and illustrated with the author's own drawings, its typography splintering and stretching across the page — is a visceral, darkly funny, formally daring work of literary science-fiction horror. Beneath its gore, it is a sharp meditation on the body, disability, gender, and the exhausting labour of passing as something you are not.