By Hee Jung Park
Tokyopop, 288 pp.
Rating: 16+

Like any short story compilation, there’s a positive and negative aspect to Hee Jung Park’s quickie installments format. The upside: short, vignette type pieces that can pack a punch in a minimal page space. The downside: a huge quality range, with some pieces making stylistic sense and the others, well, not so much. For the most part, Too Long is bent on telling a series of interlocked vignettes. This makes a great deal of sense for a short story compilation and, for the most part, flows well. The latter half of the book, however, deteriorates into a motley collection of genres, styles, and tones, some which clash rather sharply.

The stories themselves vary widely in length and weight. The linked vignettes idea works, but many of the stories don’t. Much of Park’s writing remains mired in too much weight and philosophizing, and not enough substantative support. It’s hard to care about characters over a span of twenty pages; it’s even harder if they spend most of that time musing about their depressing circumstances, be it suicide, loneliness, or guilt. It all seems like an attempt to push stories into the “powerful and emotionally moving” range by sheer downer plot lines alone. It’s a trite technique, and, once called out, rather grating.

That said, the stories where Park manages to introduce a little levity or warmth are much more palatable, and are marked even by their much less pretentious artistic styles. The angstier ones, however, are overflowing with a plethora of artistic cuts, angles and rather hefty textual blocks. All of the stories benefit from Park’s good sense of spacing and paneling, but the meandering internal monologues accompanied by either solid tone or artistic cuts come off as exasperating rather than insightful. Park’s style of rendering humans also takes a bit of getting used to, as faces, particularly eyes, have some issues conveying depth of expression. There’s also a rather high level of character androgyny at work here; look twice, and that boyish character is really a girl.

Choosing to read Too Long is a lot like watching a series of student made films: short, overly pretentious, occasionally decent and far too weighed down for their short runtimes. In plumbing for depth while simultaneously ranging across every genre, the book stretches a little thin, and for the most part, comes out looking shallow. The end result is a compilation that feels in need of a good, rigorous bout of editing and cutting before it’s shelf-worthy; we understand that Park’s body of work is impressive, but that doesn’t mean you need to shove them all under one cover.

Too Long is available now.