Churn, the debut novel by Chloe Chun Seim, is a work of considerate prose, intense emotional undercurrents, and painterly sensibilities. Seim’s writing often keeps its attention to aesthetics at the forefront while still packing an impressive punch, making it feel at times like an impressionist painting on the business end of a sledgehammer, and at other times like a tumultuous dream journal.
Seim’s work is very much a product of the flash fiction culture common in the now disappearing Twitter-Literary circles: high impact emotions, firecracker scenes, and a dash of violet prose. Described as a novel-in-stories, her chapters occasionally morph into completely distinctive entities in tone and perspective. The effect creates a dreamlike quality to the entire book that slows narrative progression but enhances the overall milieu. Like its unmoored protagonists, twe are allowed to drift in and out of family holidays, parties, and funerals. The stories, most importantly, do not overstay their welcome and maintain enough connective tissue to make the novel cohesive.
Considered separately, “Communion at a Taco Bell in Gypsum, Kansas” and “Grandma Kim at Forty-Five: A Serigraph in Four Layers” are spellbinding in its precise devastation. Chapters like “Rend, Sew,” and “Wilson Lake” manage to remain inventive while still bearing much of the narrative heft. These looser chapters also allow the characters more room to breath.
Seim weaves these almost gothic sketches together into a fairly straightforward plot, but more than anything, Churn is about the sensation of watching, and surviving, a family falling to pieces. Covering the troubled adolescence, incendiary teenage years, and listless early adult years of two Korean-American siblings Jordan (The Sister) and Chung (The Brother), Churn submerges Seim’s characters into a decaying Midwestern bildungsroman. While all of her character work is highly skilled, her construction of the children’s parents is particularly inspired.
Often just out of reach while consistently complex and tragic; as parents sometimes can be, Seim deftly reveals and obscures the parents to powerful effect. Be it through a Lord of the Rings box set and a leather jacket, a maligned half-brother, or even a partial origin story. We are given enough of a look into the mother’s past and personality to make us experience a conflicted sense of grief when (spoilers) she passes. The father, appropriately, never fully forms due to his brief presence/long shadow, and we share in the children’s ill-defined loss when he departs as well. They are effectively drafted in a way a child would understand a distant parent, giving the novel all of the pain and love that comes with such a relationship. It’s difficult to craft a story propelled by unknowable agents, and it’s a testament to Seim’s vast talent that she can power a novel by enlightening and obscuring two central characters to such great effect.
Seim’s best character work is reserved for the siblings, Jordan and Chung, who are the beating heart and eyes of the story. Jordan and Chung navigate the murky waters of their mixed-race Korean heritage, their generational trauma, emerging queerness, and fraught relationship with their parents. Most notably captured is the distinct feeling of fearing someone and loving them while being too young to understand why. Beyond their trauma, Jordan and Chung feel unique in their perspective and their relationship to their families.
Jordan, who is granted to ability to burst into flames (which is somewhat relegated to magical realism texture rather than plot point) is a creature made of smoldering emotions. As the oldest sibling, she is the one endowed with the most compete arc and cleareyed perspective. Chung, the younger sibling, is subject to an early level of almost cartoonish level of violence, so much so that you can practically see the wound in him that will not heal. Both foreground different elements, but by alternating the POV across the story, Jordan and Chung provide bursts of opposing insight. Skepticism that metastasizes into cruelty from one sibling is banished by the other’s empathy. By the time one of the siblings are thrust into Quarantine, they have both evolved in such unexpected ways that the ending can’t help but be uplifting, despite taking place in 2020.
In subject matter and off-kilter humor, Churn is not unlike Anne Garretta’s In Concrete (1990), a novel that similarly submerges its rural poor siblings, though Garretta uses cement and dense puns to bury her protagonists. There is also some slight DNA from Kevin Wilson’s Nothing to See Here in terms of neglected children obtaining fiery abilities. However, it is more accurate to say that Churn is not really much like anything else. Through her intense prose and inventive illustrations, Seim delivers on Churn’s titular promise. It’s a sometimes upsetting, opaque, and mystifying book that leaves a lasting impression. Chloe Chun Seim has created a haunting portrait of familial trauma and survival in Kansas, but also of love and growth. As a debut, it is slightly shaggy, but the level of craft and care present in the prose more than make up for any shortcomings. But then again, dreams, like families, are never quite so simple.
Churn, by Chloe Chun Seim. Huntsville, Texas: Texas Review Press, January 2024. 185 pages. $22.95, paper.
Adam Camiolo (@upandadamagain) is a writer, and occasional firefighter, who lives in New York. His work can be found in the Schuylkill Valley Journal, The Daily Drunk, The Foreign Policy Book Review, Heavy Feather Review, and he contributes to Poparatus.com.
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