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Hunter
A provincial ambulance drives through the night in search of a hospital, a fifth-rate actor goes method as a hitman on a sweltering rooftop, a legendary knife fighter is found working on the factory floor of a northern village. Hunter's stories of deceptive, brutal realism play with myth and history, offering a vision of ordinary life in China with a magic realist turn.
Filled with dark humour and written with a tinge of noir, these fictions grapple with the realities of contemporary China, and show why Shuang Xuetao is the most highly-celebrated young writer working in the country today.
Filled with dark humour and written with a tinge of noir, these fictions grapple with the realities of contemporary China, and show why Shuang Xuetao is the most highly-celebrated young writer working in the country today.
256 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2019
25 people are currently reading
772 people want to read
About the author
Shuang Xuetao
20 books52 followersShuang Xuetao (Chinese: 双雪涛; born September 8, 1983, in Shenyang), is a contemporary Chinese novelist. He graduated from the Jilin University School of Law.
In 2010, Shuang happened to see that the newly established China Times International Chinese-language Film and Fiction Award was seeking submissions. An employee of the Liaoning branch of the China Development Bank at the time, he wrote his first novel, Gargoyle in just 20 days, winning the award. In 2012, Shuang was shortlisted for the 14th Taipei Literature Awards, winning a cash-prize of 200,000 NTD, becoming the first mainland Chinese author to win the prize. That same year, Shuang quit his job to devote himself to writing full-time. In 2015, he left Shenyang to attend further studies in creative writing at Renmin University in Beijing.
Since 2016, Shuang has published the novels Tianwu's Account, Era of the Deaf and Dumb and the short story collections The Aviator, The Hunter, among other works. The short story "Assassinate the Novelist", included in the collection The Aviator, has been adapted into a film of the same name, directed by Ning Hao.
His short story collection Moses on the Plain was translated into English as Rouge Street: Three Novellas by Jeremy Tiang, and published by the Metropolitan Books imprint of Henry Holt and Company in April 2022. The book is credited with initiating the Dongbei renaissance in Chinese literature.
(Chinese: 双雪涛)
In 2010, Shuang happened to see that the newly established China Times International Chinese-language Film and Fiction Award was seeking submissions. An employee of the Liaoning branch of the China Development Bank at the time, he wrote his first novel, Gargoyle in just 20 days, winning the award. In 2012, Shuang was shortlisted for the 14th Taipei Literature Awards, winning a cash-prize of 200,000 NTD, becoming the first mainland Chinese author to win the prize. That same year, Shuang quit his job to devote himself to writing full-time. In 2015, he left Shenyang to attend further studies in creative writing at Renmin University in Beijing.
Since 2016, Shuang has published the novels Tianwu's Account, Era of the Deaf and Dumb and the short story collections The Aviator, The Hunter, among other works. The short story "Assassinate the Novelist", included in the collection The Aviator, has been adapted into a film of the same name, directed by Ning Hao.
His short story collection Moses on the Plain was translated into English as Rouge Street: Three Novellas by Jeremy Tiang, and published by the Metropolitan Books imprint of Henry Holt and Company in April 2022. The book is credited with initiating the Dongbei renaissance in Chinese literature.
(Chinese: 双雪涛)
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
February 5, 2026
‘—go learn to cook noodles. You'll need to have a relationship with noodles as well as with your rifle. This character treats shooting as a very serious business—they say, 'Where the focus lies, there you'll find the spirit.’ Know what—I'd like to know more about—who does he love? Does he prefer tea or Coca-Cola? Does he sleep on his back or his side? After—does he go for noodles or have a shower? Is he a radical environmentalist? Or does he have trouble peeing? Sorry to bother you—’
rtc later , but this is undoubtedly, thoroughly brilliant - felt right to round this off to a five, albeit with a little bit of hesitation at first .
‘—no pressure—no pauses either—solid drinking—but she spoke Chinese—so I learned—Russian for nothing—He held up his hand and ordered another whiskey—I wanted to say that she might look foreign but she was actually Chinese—Ma Liye smacked him in the face and said, If you ever come near me again—I'll kill you. C blinked by way of saying yes. She slapped him again and said, How do you feel? Better, he said, much better’
‘You ever want to see me again, just place an apple under the paw of the stone lion at Beiling Park's east gate—I'll remember that, I said. He smiled at me, turned and left. I watched from the window, but didn't see him emerge. I've eaten quite a few apples in the years since. To be honest, they're my favourite fruit, and I've never wasted a single one.’
‘I would write more but time is running out—If you receive this letter—No response is needed. Please remember this and find a way to go on living. If you are dead then it does not matter—it's enough that we were once together. May we recognise each other when we meet again. That shouldn't be difficult—I only exist this time round because I met you—This is all I have time for. The postman has been waiting too long’
‘She's—had—wine—face blooms red like—demon in Journey to the West. She—gets—formal—earnest—as if nothing matters in the world—You'll never know how long it took me to walk here—but I have no regrets. And then w/ all the strength in her body—she lets out a sob like a thunderclap.’
rtc later , but this is undoubtedly, thoroughly brilliant - felt right to round this off to a five, albeit with a little bit of hesitation at first .
‘—no pressure—no pauses either—solid drinking—but she spoke Chinese—so I learned—Russian for nothing—He held up his hand and ordered another whiskey—I wanted to say that she might look foreign but she was actually Chinese—Ma Liye smacked him in the face and said, If you ever come near me again—I'll kill you. C blinked by way of saying yes. She slapped him again and said, How do you feel? Better, he said, much better’
‘You ever want to see me again, just place an apple under the paw of the stone lion at Beiling Park's east gate—I'll remember that, I said. He smiled at me, turned and left. I watched from the window, but didn't see him emerge. I've eaten quite a few apples in the years since. To be honest, they're my favourite fruit, and I've never wasted a single one.’
‘I would write more but time is running out—If you receive this letter—No response is needed. Please remember this and find a way to go on living. If you are dead then it does not matter—it's enough that we were once together. May we recognise each other when we meet again. That shouldn't be difficult—I only exist this time round because I met you—This is all I have time for. The postman has been waiting too long’
‘She's—had—wine—face blooms red like—demon in Journey to the West. She—gets—formal—earnest—as if nothing matters in the world—You'll never know how long it took me to walk here—but I have no regrets. And then w/ all the strength in her body—she lets out a sob like a thunderclap.’
September 29, 2025
Hunter is a collection of short stories, set mainly in Beijing and centred upon urban alienation. Most include magical realism elements and sudden death, or threats of it. They all have a distinctive and rather haunted atmosphere, created by Shuang Xuotao's writing and good translation. Rather than approaching political issues directly, Xuotao largely does so elliptically via memories, fictions-within-fiction, and personal relationships. The difficulties of connection and understanding in the city are recurring motifs. I found this passage from 'Daughter' particularly striking:
I think 'Daughter' was my favourite story in the collection, as the metatextuality was so cleverly done. Of the others, I found the most memorable imagery in 'Hunter' and the most unsettling twists in 'Up at Night'. The stories cohere nicely, making Hunter an interesting and distinctive collection.
For many years now I longed to burrow into the mass of humanity and form intimate connections, but I couldn't change myself and nor could the world. It was like with my pets - I didn't want to go out so they developed a cough; they got fleas and I ended up annoyed. In the end we always part ways. Writing fiction is different. My characters might loathe me, they might find me hard to live with, but they're my creations and so they have to accept their fate. I create their universe, I provide the blood that flows through their veins and the hair that sprouts on their heads. When I offer up a world I've created, other people read it and imagine they've learned something about me, but they're probably way off base. They think reading my work brings us closer, but I'm the one who gets to determine the distance between us. Sure, this means I end up living like a prisoner, but everything has a price, and no matter what, your life is going to get used up. That's probably what Schopenhauer meant when he said we live to keep from dying, we walk to keep from falling over.
I think 'Daughter' was my favourite story in the collection, as the metatextuality was so cleverly done. Of the others, I found the most memorable imagery in 'Hunter' and the most unsettling twists in 'Up at Night'. The stories cohere nicely, making Hunter an interesting and distinctive collection.
October 21, 2025
I genuinely believe that Shuang Xuetao is one of the most exciting contemporary authors to watch because you just never know what to expect. His earlier collection of interconnected novellas, 'Rouge Street,' is overtly historical (and very good!), while this collection of eleven seemingly random stories is doing something a little more sly and playful with the idea of historical fiction. His stories range from using some magical realism ('Mars') to being delightfully absurdist ('Daughter', 'Up at Night').
His protagonists are largely men, the sons or grandsons of working class men who lived through the war, the revolution, or poverty. Some of them are fathers by description but who fail to fit the bill somehow, whose own desires or ambitions supersede their familial responsibilities. I cannot say that I relate to them but in just a handful of sentences, the author makes them feel so flawed and so real. A couple of the stories were structurally satisfying; when you reached the end, it felt like the closing of a circle ('Martial Artist', 'Heart', 'Hunter', 'Sen').
I like best the story 'Premonition', in which an author encounters an alien who threatens to flood his town unless he returns a stolen sentence generations ago. I also really liked 'Yang Guangyi', in which the sensible son of a factory worker resolutely refuses to engage with anything fantastical, knowing that the stuff of legends is also the bringer of unnecessary trouble.
His protagonists are largely men, the sons or grandsons of working class men who lived through the war, the revolution, or poverty. Some of them are fathers by description but who fail to fit the bill somehow, whose own desires or ambitions supersede their familial responsibilities. I cannot say that I relate to them but in just a handful of sentences, the author makes them feel so flawed and so real. A couple of the stories were structurally satisfying; when you reached the end, it felt like the closing of a circle ('Martial Artist', 'Heart', 'Hunter', 'Sen').
I like best the story 'Premonition', in which an author encounters an alien who threatens to flood his town unless he returns a stolen sentence generations ago. I also really liked 'Yang Guangyi', in which the sensible son of a factory worker resolutely refuses to engage with anything fantastical, knowing that the stuff of legends is also the bringer of unnecessary trouble.
August 24, 2025
There is a tinge of nostalgia & melancholy about Shuang Xuetao's Hunter stories. A collection of short stories suffused with surrealism, dark humor & fantastical with touch of noir of people & culture in Northern China. Its so unique & refreshing with sone heartfelt & odd moments that are hauntingly beautiful. I have always been amused by short stories and the deviousness of an author pulling such crafts in a span of one single story especially ones that made me feel for the characters with a wish the story can be longer. Chinese literature to me is very fascinating, its the combination of culture, historical and the roots of their traditions embedded in the stories made you feel closer to them. The stories here grappled with the realities of Contemporary China told in the many lenses of people of various backgrounds but most prominently through people from arts background like authors, writers or an actor
A dying old man suffering from a heart attack, a hereditary disease in their family is on an late night ambulance to a hospital, a famed killer rumors and the encounter with the son of a master, the odd conversation on fatal killings between two friends in the middle of the night, a dilapidated theatre in a faraway town, a method actor get lost in his role as a hitman, a Japanese man obsession with martial arts and the revenge that prevailed after a tragic death, a writer reads a story by an aspiring author with a twist, a premonition of impending doom riddled with questions in the middle of the night at the river. Its hard to encapsulate the writing of Shuang Xuetao in this review because the way the author crafted the stories was ominous & surreal. I was invested with many of the stories in here with my favourite is Heart, the opening of the story of a father's final moment of death and the son acceptance of it, its the grief of accepting his death, Premonition is another great one with a haunting undertone of an unknown entity threatening of your life, Mars was scarily weird, Hunter was just chefs kiss, Martial artists was the best revenge story
Each tales was riddled in this dreamlike, almost nostalgic quality to them with fantastical noir vibe, the evocative tales lulled me to its melody and charms of the stories. What a great collection of stories!
Thank you Definitely Books for the review copy
A dying old man suffering from a heart attack, a hereditary disease in their family is on an late night ambulance to a hospital, a famed killer rumors and the encounter with the son of a master, the odd conversation on fatal killings between two friends in the middle of the night, a dilapidated theatre in a faraway town, a method actor get lost in his role as a hitman, a Japanese man obsession with martial arts and the revenge that prevailed after a tragic death, a writer reads a story by an aspiring author with a twist, a premonition of impending doom riddled with questions in the middle of the night at the river. Its hard to encapsulate the writing of Shuang Xuetao in this review because the way the author crafted the stories was ominous & surreal. I was invested with many of the stories in here with my favourite is Heart, the opening of the story of a father's final moment of death and the son acceptance of it, its the grief of accepting his death, Premonition is another great one with a haunting undertone of an unknown entity threatening of your life, Mars was scarily weird, Hunter was just chefs kiss, Martial artists was the best revenge story
Each tales was riddled in this dreamlike, almost nostalgic quality to them with fantastical noir vibe, the evocative tales lulled me to its melody and charms of the stories. What a great collection of stories!
Thank you Definitely Books for the review copy
July 8, 2023
i liked this collection of short stories a lot, i think shuang xuetao is a really skillful writer!
sometimes i'm not sure if i find something funny/charming/well-written because it's simply in chinese (and i find everything chinese infinitely charming Haha ha) or if it's actually "good" in some neutral and measurable way (i.e. if a native chinese speaker would find it really great and amazing??) but i realized while reading this book that i should just enjoy the heightened appreciation that comes out of not having full mastery of a language, and often things are funny and good because they ARE specifically in chinese
these stories are all essentially about the dreams and anxieties that animate middle-aged chinese men. there's kind of a magic realism vibe... also loved that almost every story involved a writer and someone practicing martial arts (it's cool when you can see an author's preoccupations so clearly lol)
my fav stories were 《女儿》、《预感》、《心脏》、and 《猎人》. i found《猎人》("the hunter") kind of shockingly good, something something abt the violence/brutality underlying everyday life, how men deal with becoming ancillary, but also just quite funny/absurd
sometimes i'm not sure if i find something funny/charming/well-written because it's simply in chinese (and i find everything chinese infinitely charming Haha ha) or if it's actually "good" in some neutral and measurable way (i.e. if a native chinese speaker would find it really great and amazing??) but i realized while reading this book that i should just enjoy the heightened appreciation that comes out of not having full mastery of a language, and often things are funny and good because they ARE specifically in chinese
these stories are all essentially about the dreams and anxieties that animate middle-aged chinese men. there's kind of a magic realism vibe... also loved that almost every story involved a writer and someone practicing martial arts (it's cool when you can see an author's preoccupations so clearly lol)
my fav stories were 《女儿》、《预感》、《心脏》、and 《猎人》. i found《猎人》("the hunter") kind of shockingly good, something something abt the violence/brutality underlying everyday life, how men deal with becoming ancillary, but also just quite funny/absurd
December 16, 2025
"For many years now I longed to burrow into the mass of humanity and form intimate connections, but I couldn't change myself and nor could the world. It was like with my pets - I didn't want to go out so they developed a cough; they got fleas and I ended up annoyed. In the end we always part ways. Writing fiction is different. My characters might loathe me, they might find me hard to live with, but they're my creations and so they have to accept their fate. I create their universe, I provide the blood that flows through their veins and the hair that sprouts on their heads. When I offer up a world I've created, other people read it and imagine they've learned something about me, but they're probably way off base. They think reading my work brings us closer, but I'm the one who gets to determine the distance between us. Sure, this means I end up living like a prisoner, but everything has a price, and no matter what, your life is going to get used up. That's probably what Schopenhauer meant when he said we live to keep from dying, we walk to keep from falling over."
Hunter, a collection of 11 short stories (written in Chinese by Shuang Xuetao [双雪涛] and translated by Jeremy Tiang) mostly set in Beijing, Shenyang and London. These stories feature 11 very different characters, blending absurdism, magical realism and surrealism but the overarching themes would be the author's play of notions of displacement, alienation and historical trauma. Shuang Xuetao is regarded as one of China’s most talented post-80s writers. His prose is spare and incisive. Yet, he managed to evoke an atmosphere of nostalgia and melancholy. This, to me, are traits of post-modernism or metafiction literature, which sometimes does not necessary require readers to read too much into the lines
My favorites are "Up at Night" (the narrator meets up with his friend Yue XiaoQi where Yue XiaoQI revealed that he accidentally killed his wife and placed her body in his car's trunk, and he is now seeking for the narrator's help), "Premonition" (while fishing alone at night, sci-fi writer Li Xiaobing meets a man called Andrew, clad in a suit and tie, who proclaims that the city is about to face the Last Judgment on the basis that his "sentence" has been stolen by the locals), "Daughter" (an author was confronted by a young man who claimed that he is a better writer than the author and the young man starts sending chapters of his novel to the author), "Squirrels" (a teenage narrator is commanded by a soldier to shoot his male class captain, who has sexually harassed a classmate, but instead witnesses the captain collapse from heatstroke as the soldier vanishes), "Martial Artist" (Dou Dou, son of an underground Communist Party member killed by the Japanese, as he moves through China’s political upheavals from the Japanese occupation to the Cultural Revolution). Highly recommended collection of short stories! Thanks to Definitely Books and Pansing Distribution for sending this review copy to me!
Hunter, a collection of 11 short stories (written in Chinese by Shuang Xuetao [双雪涛] and translated by Jeremy Tiang) mostly set in Beijing, Shenyang and London. These stories feature 11 very different characters, blending absurdism, magical realism and surrealism but the overarching themes would be the author's play of notions of displacement, alienation and historical trauma. Shuang Xuetao is regarded as one of China’s most talented post-80s writers. His prose is spare and incisive. Yet, he managed to evoke an atmosphere of nostalgia and melancholy. This, to me, are traits of post-modernism or metafiction literature, which sometimes does not necessary require readers to read too much into the lines
My favorites are "Up at Night" (the narrator meets up with his friend Yue XiaoQi where Yue XiaoQI revealed that he accidentally killed his wife and placed her body in his car's trunk, and he is now seeking for the narrator's help), "Premonition" (while fishing alone at night, sci-fi writer Li Xiaobing meets a man called Andrew, clad in a suit and tie, who proclaims that the city is about to face the Last Judgment on the basis that his "sentence" has been stolen by the locals), "Daughter" (an author was confronted by a young man who claimed that he is a better writer than the author and the young man starts sending chapters of his novel to the author), "Squirrels" (a teenage narrator is commanded by a soldier to shoot his male class captain, who has sexually harassed a classmate, but instead witnesses the captain collapse from heatstroke as the soldier vanishes), "Martial Artist" (Dou Dou, son of an underground Communist Party member killed by the Japanese, as he moves through China’s political upheavals from the Japanese occupation to the Cultural Revolution). Highly recommended collection of short stories! Thanks to Definitely Books and Pansing Distribution for sending this review copy to me!
June 21, 2025
4/5
Read this on and off for more than a month, but enjoyed every bit of it. It’s strangely nostalgic for me in a way? The way the stories are told and the phrases/language used is exactly how my father would say it. There’s something so comforting about this book. I’m going to try and read more Chinese literature in the months to come.
Read this on and off for more than a month, but enjoyed every bit of it. It’s strangely nostalgic for me in a way? The way the stories are told and the phrases/language used is exactly how my father would say it. There’s something so comforting about this book. I’m going to try and read more Chinese literature in the months to come.
April 30, 2021
看完《聋哑时代》后，从没想过双雪涛的短篇，会是这样一种风格。
有一次听《随机波动》的播客，他是嘉宾，很幽默风趣又乐观的样子，但他的小说有股挥之不去的忧伤。
有一次听《随机波动》的播客，他是嘉宾，很幽默风趣又乐观的样子，但他的小说有股挥之不去的忧伤。
February 12, 2026
I really wanted to like this because I liked Rouge Street, but some of the same issues I had with that collection were apparent in this one too. I felt there were too many stories, many of which were disjointed and too short for me to actually care abt the characters or plot. Thematically it is kind of the same story over and over again. I would love to read a longer novel by Xuetao where the characters are allowed some time to marinate and develop. Some of the magical realism elements were confusing and nonsensical/ not well integrated into the stories, he does reference Murakami a couple times which is a fun Easter egg but I find Xuetao’s writing style a bit jarring in comparison. Maybe it’s a translation issue. With 11 short stories in about 250 pages, I just didn’t connect to a lot of them. Over half of them were forgettable. My favorites were Heart, Mars, Martial Artist, and Hunter. I think in a few years when he’s had time to develop his style Xuetao’s writing will be really really good, but this collection is definitely a bit undercooked. He has a lot of potential though and will definitely be reading the next translation of his works.
August 24, 2025
Having read his novellas in ‘Rouge Street,’ I think I can say Shuang is a master of storycraft. Even when these tales are a little navel-gazing (writers, actors, &c) they are so deeply rooted in character that there’s no way they are stand-in lackadaisical premises like with some other well-known authors. I would love to see whatever shows or movies are based on these stories.
September 20, 2025
Lots of really great ideas but I felt like most of the stories themselves didn't live up to how interesting the ideas were. V v interesting insights into China and loved the spooky horror vines but bar a couple of stories they generally tended to feel like a swing and a miss. Saying that, I would definitely read something by Xuetao again in like 5/10 years' time as it feels like this has lots of promise but just needs a bit more time to be able to fully deliver on it.
January 7, 2026
I picked up this book of short stories on a whim from one of my favourite local bookshops because I found the blurb and first page compelling. These stories just washed over me and left me in a wonderful daze.
July 27, 2025
The reason I awarded this book 3 stars only is that despite the fact that these short stories are original and in a way « out there » I just could not understand the meaning behind them. Perhaps it is the cultural divide and my lack of understanding of Chinese culture but I felt largely like an outsider reading an inside joke and missing the whole point. I hoped to get absorbed into a different genre and be transported into a different world as it were, but it did not work out that way unfortunately.
January 27, 2026
People walk into their own cinema, and become part of it. Who, then, remains to be the witness, the playwright, and the actor?
As eerie and bizarre as the cover image—a deer appearing from behind a concrete column in a concrete hall emptied of the human—suggests, Shuang Xuetao’s short story collection Hunter gathers 11 brutally surreal vignettes of ordinary lives in Beijing and Shenyang. Development in the urban landscape of northeastern China is haunted by the remnants and mutation of collapsed empires: the Manchu and the Japanese ones.
A shenyang native, Shuang Xuetao grew up from the 1980s witnessing much of the city’s heavy industry grinds to a halt as the country, led by the east coast powers like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, accelerated its investment in the postindustrial economy. A few failed attempts to emulate Beijing’s global trade strategies pushed Shenyang into a deeper and wider economic depression, spanning from the city center to the periphery. Cheaper food, service, and labor prevail, but the city drags itself towards a dull horizon. The characters in Shuang’s stories inhabit this melancholy and dreary reality, and at the same time embody it. The tangible world shifts just like the mediascape: things, people, relationships, and events suddenly occur out of nowhere, create their own theater of sorts, and swap the characters and the spectators’ positions. Those theaters don’t stay where they are, nor do they disappear. They fold into other realities, shuffling past, present, and future like a deck of cards.
Death feels imminent at all times in the stories. It threatens to jump out of depression, jealousy, hopelessness, the loss of innocence, and, especially on the land of the former Manchu and Japanese empires, restless imperial memories. In “Sen,” a Japanese director-turned war criminal Yamamoto who survived an assassination attempt by a Western man in the 1940s in Peiping turns his experience into a feature film and sells it to a Chinese director decades later, while the film and the experience could have switched places already. In the “Martial Artist,” the only meeting between an underground Chinese Communist Party sympathizer and a Japanese martial artist in the 1930s ended up with the former’s murder by the latter’s disciple. Dou Chongshi’s martyrdom to protect a mysterious Japanese manual of magic and the intactness of the CCP’s network sent Dou Dou, now orphaned, onto his academic journey across the country, only to find himself strangely protected from both the Communist persecution and the unresolved Japanese revenge in the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s.
Yet, instead of killing, the threat lures the protagonists in and out of cycles of hallucination. Instead of horror and scare, these stories rather implement Mark Fisher’s theory of “the weird and the eerie.” “The allure that the weird and the eerie possess is not captured by the idea that we ‘enjoy what scares us’. It has, rather, to do with a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience.” Fisher differentiates the weird as something present that cannot reconcile with or be represented by the familiar, but is nonetheless juxtaposed with the homely. In comparison, the eerie is concerned with “Why is there something here when there should be nothing? Why is there nothing here when there should be something?” It is fundamentally about agency, like that of capital—“conjured out of nothing, [but] nevertheless exert[ing] more influence than any allegedly substantial entity.”
Shuang’s stories enact what one could perhaps call the “Dongbei (northeast) noir.” Rather than horror, they engage with the hollowness of modern everyday life. Where death could be executed, the story twists and, in a snap of a finger, life slips into a different dimension. At the same time, the protagonist is jerked out of the dimension of dreaming where he was. In these stories, precisely as Fisher describes, the weird and the eerie are affects, “but they are also modes: modes of film and fiction, modes of perception, ultimately, you might even say, modes of being.” Who wouldn’t say this sudden, dramatic shift of modes of being, from history to dream to film, from rehearsal to reality and back, very much emulates the chaotic time we are in, that promises a future and shatters it the next moment? That builds a ground of livelihood and yanks it from under our feet the next moment? That assigns a trauma to the past and hurls it back to us the next moment? Surrealism is more real than fictional, than ever.
As eerie and bizarre as the cover image—a deer appearing from behind a concrete column in a concrete hall emptied of the human—suggests, Shuang Xuetao’s short story collection Hunter gathers 11 brutally surreal vignettes of ordinary lives in Beijing and Shenyang. Development in the urban landscape of northeastern China is haunted by the remnants and mutation of collapsed empires: the Manchu and the Japanese ones.
A shenyang native, Shuang Xuetao grew up from the 1980s witnessing much of the city’s heavy industry grinds to a halt as the country, led by the east coast powers like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, accelerated its investment in the postindustrial economy. A few failed attempts to emulate Beijing’s global trade strategies pushed Shenyang into a deeper and wider economic depression, spanning from the city center to the periphery. Cheaper food, service, and labor prevail, but the city drags itself towards a dull horizon. The characters in Shuang’s stories inhabit this melancholy and dreary reality, and at the same time embody it. The tangible world shifts just like the mediascape: things, people, relationships, and events suddenly occur out of nowhere, create their own theater of sorts, and swap the characters and the spectators’ positions. Those theaters don’t stay where they are, nor do they disappear. They fold into other realities, shuffling past, present, and future like a deck of cards.
Death feels imminent at all times in the stories. It threatens to jump out of depression, jealousy, hopelessness, the loss of innocence, and, especially on the land of the former Manchu and Japanese empires, restless imperial memories. In “Sen,” a Japanese director-turned war criminal Yamamoto who survived an assassination attempt by a Western man in the 1940s in Peiping turns his experience into a feature film and sells it to a Chinese director decades later, while the film and the experience could have switched places already. In the “Martial Artist,” the only meeting between an underground Chinese Communist Party sympathizer and a Japanese martial artist in the 1930s ended up with the former’s murder by the latter’s disciple. Dou Chongshi’s martyrdom to protect a mysterious Japanese manual of magic and the intactness of the CCP’s network sent Dou Dou, now orphaned, onto his academic journey across the country, only to find himself strangely protected from both the Communist persecution and the unresolved Japanese revenge in the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s.
Yet, instead of killing, the threat lures the protagonists in and out of cycles of hallucination. Instead of horror and scare, these stories rather implement Mark Fisher’s theory of “the weird and the eerie.” “The allure that the weird and the eerie possess is not captured by the idea that we ‘enjoy what scares us’. It has, rather, to do with a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience.” Fisher differentiates the weird as something present that cannot reconcile with or be represented by the familiar, but is nonetheless juxtaposed with the homely. In comparison, the eerie is concerned with “Why is there something here when there should be nothing? Why is there nothing here when there should be something?” It is fundamentally about agency, like that of capital—“conjured out of nothing, [but] nevertheless exert[ing] more influence than any allegedly substantial entity.”
Shuang’s stories enact what one could perhaps call the “Dongbei (northeast) noir.” Rather than horror, they engage with the hollowness of modern everyday life. Where death could be executed, the story twists and, in a snap of a finger, life slips into a different dimension. At the same time, the protagonist is jerked out of the dimension of dreaming where he was. In these stories, precisely as Fisher describes, the weird and the eerie are affects, “but they are also modes: modes of film and fiction, modes of perception, ultimately, you might even say, modes of being.” Who wouldn’t say this sudden, dramatic shift of modes of being, from history to dream to film, from rehearsal to reality and back, very much emulates the chaotic time we are in, that promises a future and shatters it the next moment? That builds a ground of livelihood and yanks it from under our feet the next moment? That assigns a trauma to the past and hurls it back to us the next moment? Surrealism is more real than fictional, than ever.
January 28, 2026
These stories largely don’t make sense to me the first time reading. I’m adamant if I read it in Chinese somehow i’ll understand but probably it’ll be even harder. In some ways I can understand the subtle pieces. I wish I had a book club to discuss it.
I enjoyed almost all of the stories and each one seemed distinct but compelling which is hard to do in a collection of short stories. Usually at least one or more lose my interest. In all of these I felt like I was rooting for the main character(s) and for them to achieve their “dream” or “purpose” whatever it is.
Up at Night
I feel like Shuang XueTao likes to use these parallel plots and meta structure to give meaning which is why it’s hard to fully understand everything the first time. The texts from his wife signal domestic abuse and male violence towards women. Who to believe? The narrator or the signs. The main character’s own parents also follow this pattern - dad hits mom. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter who deserves it or not, killing and beating is not justified? The way Shuang XueTao writes you want to take in every line to dissect its meaning. Even with the cat the antagonist is needlessly violent flicking his ash at it, and with his wife’s dad too he beat him up. He says “You treat her really well you’re spoiling her”- you mean treating her like a basic human? It makes you wonder did she blind herself in her right eye or did he beat her?
Theatre
I understand that somehow he is also antisocial just like his parents and are in no part of the community, rejecting community. You see him do that in everything he does - even talking to that singer in the park but not speaking up because he’s scared of scaring her away - scared of any sort of human connection. He watches his parents play cards but doesn’t join in? And because he rejects his friend that theatre is demolished as if community is the thing that keeps it together. Themes of people leaving and destruction, because what is leaving but killing that part that stays?
I enjoyed these stories a lot - will come back to it and re-read.
I enjoyed almost all of the stories and each one seemed distinct but compelling which is hard to do in a collection of short stories. Usually at least one or more lose my interest. In all of these I felt like I was rooting for the main character(s) and for them to achieve their “dream” or “purpose” whatever it is.
Up at Night
I feel like Shuang XueTao likes to use these parallel plots and meta structure to give meaning which is why it’s hard to fully understand everything the first time. The texts from his wife signal domestic abuse and male violence towards women. Who to believe? The narrator or the signs. The main character’s own parents also follow this pattern - dad hits mom. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter who deserves it or not, killing and beating is not justified? The way Shuang XueTao writes you want to take in every line to dissect its meaning. Even with the cat the antagonist is needlessly violent flicking his ash at it, and with his wife’s dad too he beat him up. He says “You treat her really well you’re spoiling her”- you mean treating her like a basic human? It makes you wonder did she blind herself in her right eye or did he beat her?
Theatre
I understand that somehow he is also antisocial just like his parents and are in no part of the community, rejecting community. You see him do that in everything he does - even talking to that singer in the park but not speaking up because he’s scared of scaring her away - scared of any sort of human connection. He watches his parents play cards but doesn’t join in? And because he rejects his friend that theatre is demolished as if community is the thing that keeps it together. Themes of people leaving and destruction, because what is leaving but killing that part that stays?
I enjoyed these stories a lot - will come back to it and re-read.
December 20, 2025
HUNTER is a collection of short stories by Shuang Xuetao, blending the everyday with moments of magic realism to give stories that are slightly absurd and resistant. In the first story, “Heart”, the narrator’s father is dying from an hereditary heart condition and he spends the night in an ambulance with his father, a surgeon, and a driver who falls asleep during the drive itself. In “Premonition”, the narrator is a writer who encounters an alien who threatens to nuke his world unless he can return a “sentence” that was stolen from the alien ages ago. In “Mars”, the contents of letters exchanged between ex-schoolmates come to life, from birds to a length of rope. Finally, in “Hunter”, an actor is given a new role to try to emulate, and he seems to become his character to the point that even the events in his character’s story echo into his own. These stories are my favourites, but there are many more in this collection. They’re all somewhat trippy and the kind of strange/absurd that I’m not used to reading, but there’s just something about the way the boundaries between reality and urban myths or magic rupture in them, that I really enjoy. There’s also something about a lot of the main characters in these stories being not-particularly-successful artists (writers, actors, humanities graduates) that I love, because their background seems to influence how they interact with the absurdities of their world.
September 1, 2025
4.2 stars. With drastically different characters over eleven short stories in both first- and third-person, Shuang offers a great variety of perspectives and observations. There are a few writers and some other artists, but I would say one commonality is that his characters are passionate about what they do. I particularly appreciated how many started with a character’s full Chinese name, as this emphasises its significance in their identity.
I liked not knowing where Shuang’s stories were going, not only because of (some) supernatural twists but also because the characters tended to be a bit strange, so figuring out their personalities was a mystery of its own. I especially favoured those that made me emotional, so my favourites are Sen, Daughter, and Mars, which also coincidentally all include a dual-timeline or embedded narrative.
This was my first ever Chinese translation! It was interesting to feel the essence of the language come through and subconsciously guess at the original words used. It’s also meaningful to note that I could feel the shift in tone from the standard narratives to more formal portions, like the love letter or theatre script.
I think they’re all best read when going in blind and I highly recommend this collection!
I liked not knowing where Shuang’s stories were going, not only because of (some) supernatural twists but also because the characters tended to be a bit strange, so figuring out their personalities was a mystery of its own. I especially favoured those that made me emotional, so my favourites are Sen, Daughter, and Mars, which also coincidentally all include a dual-timeline or embedded narrative.
This was my first ever Chinese translation! It was interesting to feel the essence of the language come through and subconsciously guess at the original words used. It’s also meaningful to note that I could feel the shift in tone from the standard narratives to more formal portions, like the love letter or theatre script.
I think they’re all best read when going in blind and I highly recommend this collection!
September 27, 2025
I can’t really give this a higher rating for me personally, but this is one of those cases where the fault mainly lies with me I reckon. I’m not sure if something got lost with translation, but even outside of that, I felt like I just didn’t understand the subtleties of the stories. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a lot of hidden meaning and cultural nods that Chinese readers would be able to pick up on considering the state of censorship in China, but I just couldn’t and because I also didn’t really like the style of the narration, I just didn’t vibe with it.
A lot of stories also didn’t do enough with their pretty cool premise - the best example is the first story, where a man accompanies his dying father to Beijing in an ambulance only to suddenly realise that everyone else on board (including the driver) is asleep and he can’t wake them up. This is such a cool idea, proper claustrophobic horror movie stuff, but it didn’t amount to anything. The only story that packed some punch was Mars and even that one I felt like I didn’t quite get.
So yeah, I think I got a bit taken in by the cool cover and what seemed like interesting premises - just wasn’t for me, although people more familiar with Chinese culture/ literature might get a lot more out of it.
A lot of stories also didn’t do enough with their pretty cool premise - the best example is the first story, where a man accompanies his dying father to Beijing in an ambulance only to suddenly realise that everyone else on board (including the driver) is asleep and he can’t wake them up. This is such a cool idea, proper claustrophobic horror movie stuff, but it didn’t amount to anything. The only story that packed some punch was Mars and even that one I felt like I didn’t quite get.
So yeah, I think I got a bit taken in by the cool cover and what seemed like interesting premises - just wasn’t for me, although people more familiar with Chinese culture/ literature might get a lot more out of it.
August 4, 2025
this was a solid collection of stories, xuetao has a very individual style and sense of humour and his stories are entertaining enough that i can overlook the lack of speech marks in his dialogue.
unsurprisingly for a book containing multiple stories it’s a bit of a mixed bag, not in terms of quality just in terms of how entertaining i found them personally.
sen, martial artist & hunter were the highlights for me. i found their subject matters to be the most interesting and felt the most satisfied by their stories, perhaps because they are slightly more conventional.
squirrels, heart, yang guangyi & up at night all fall somewhere in the middle for me. i enjoyed them all but they seemed to have something (not sure what) missing perhaps.
daughter, premonition, mars & theatre were the least effective of the stories for me. i just don’t think i got them in the same way i did the others.
overall though, very solid book i enjoyed it.
unsurprisingly for a book containing multiple stories it’s a bit of a mixed bag, not in terms of quality just in terms of how entertaining i found them personally.
sen, martial artist & hunter were the highlights for me. i found their subject matters to be the most interesting and felt the most satisfied by their stories, perhaps because they are slightly more conventional.
squirrels, heart, yang guangyi & up at night all fall somewhere in the middle for me. i enjoyed them all but they seemed to have something (not sure what) missing perhaps.
daughter, premonition, mars & theatre were the least effective of the stories for me. i just don’t think i got them in the same way i did the others.
overall though, very solid book i enjoyed it.
November 15, 2025
Liberal use of non-sequitur, relationships characterised by ennui and dissatisfaction, and a keen sense of absurd humour make for easy Murakami Haruki comparisons (Shuang references him directly in here, so it's no surprise that he has apparently cited him as an influence). Which is a good thing, because I like Murakami! There is something very real and somehow soul-soothing about these ostensibly gloomy portraits of modern-day malaise that makes them very appealing to me, perhaps because estrangement is increasingly a feature of global urban life and it feels quite comforting to simply compare notes on how loneliness does weird and funny things to our minds.
August 7, 2025
strange; and quite good.
February 3, 2026
dark and concise. themes of family, nature, the supernatural, fear and revenge. the stories sit together nicely without being repetitive.
May 16, 2020
不当东北博尔赫斯的作者有点缺乏辨识度（艳粉街出现了一次让人有点怀念“老姑文学”），故事有重复感，都是“说一句给别人，然后就不再有下句，或者是回答一句给别人，也不再说了。所谓来言去语，基本没有”这样的风格，各篇之间的人物对话好像可以任意交换，虽然故事大相径庭。
December 3, 2020
喜欢这个风格和调调。
December 19, 2020
没了东北风格 特色还在
March 6, 2021
这本比《聋哑时代》要成熟很多，明显感到技艺进步了，进步的标志就是，写作技巧很内化，痕迹很淡
August 6, 2021
亦幻亦真，中青年的困境似乎都用不同的形式表达出来，欲望和失语像是双生。
August 9, 2024
每个故事都很轻巧易读，但本人领悟能力略低，真不知道作者想要表达啥
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