Since when is Korea in South Asia? Has the reviewer confused Korea with Vietnam?

Calling West Virginia "Southern" in a comparison to Faulkner's world is a bit of a stretch. The Appalachians have a culture all their own, which is distinct from lowland Southern culture and especially from the kind of decaying landed gentry that inhabited Faulkner's Mississippi. The Southern aristocracy as we know it (plantations, slaves, etc.) barely existed in places like West Virginia, which is why it seceded from Virginia during the Civil War. Mountain people from Pennsylvania would likely have more in common with their counterparts in Georgia than they would with Philadelphians.

Unfortunately the terms "southern" and "gothic" have nearly become inseparable in the wake of Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. Speaking of fiction set in the actual South, though, isn't it refreshing when someone writes a more naturalistic work? Rather than just slouching towards Yoknapatawpha?

The family in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury is named Compson, not Compton.

I object to the facile and widespread assumption that the short story is necessarily an "appetizer" of sorts, the writer's apprenticeship for the labor of writing a "real" book, that is, a novel. The short story is its own genre, one that has more in common with lyric poetry, drama, comics, popular songs, and the novella than it does with the novel. The tendency to view the short story as mere prelude to the novel--as a kind of juvenilia, in a word--is based on the marketing priorities and conventions of the big profit-driven publishing houses, which in turn shape public tastes and perceptions. It's a tendency that also infects the profusion of American M.F.A. programs in creative writing, and it constitutes a virtual censorship by the bottom line. This privileging of the novel, apart from its detrimental effects on writers, has nothing to do with the realities and aesthetic choices that inform the work of creating short fiction.