My introduction to the work of Korean author Bora Chung was not her first collection, Cursed Bunny—which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2023—but her second, Your Utopia. Where Bunny was visceral and embodied, Utopia was science fictional and distant, almost cool, but human and wry even in its least utopian moments. The stories were about the strange shapes of the world we’ve made, un-utopian, technological in unhelpful directions, built for consumption and surveillance. (I read it around the time I read Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird, and the two books walk hand in hand in my memory.)
The two collections suggested that Chung could probably strike out in any genre direction and hit gold. This was confirmed by her novel Red Sword (published in the UK by Honford Star), a disconcerting science fiction war novel, unnerving and beautiful in its clearly imagined horrors.
Chung’s new “novel in ghost stories,” Midnight Timetable, is also something else altogether. A collection of tales built around the objects in an Institute, it is loving and strange, sympathetic and generous, as it tackles the objects, beings, things left behind in the wake of violence and cruelty. Here, the humans cause the haunting. The objects hold the memory.
From the start, each ghost story is a form of collective—or institutional—knowledge. The stories for the most part are told to an unnamed new employee by their sunbae, an older blind woman who seems to know the story of every object in the Institute’s rooms (and some that escape the rooms). Like many ghost stories, these are largely heard second or third-hand. Someone told them to someone else, and the story lived on, even if its subjects sometimes did not.
Chung is so effective with the eerie nature of her tales that it is easy to be drawn along purely by the strangeness: An employee finds himself in an endless tunnel; people get baffling phone calls asking about their own funeral arrangements; a man becomes fixated on an item that belonged to his dead mother; a supernatural-occurrences streamer becomes his own subject after he takes an object from the Institute; a sheep knows the future. Chung, though, is focused on trauma, and injustice, and social structure: The man in the tunnel is queer, and has been through hell thanks to his parents; the woman to whom the sheep speaks is trying to escape her gambling husband, to save her daughter from inheriting the man’s debt. In an interview with Ramona magazine, Chung explained the core of her novel beautifully:
In The Midnight Timetable I wanted to talk about trauma and its aftermath. Members of the minority, such as Chan who is gay and the vice director who is a woman, are more susceptible to trauma. And they are often gaslit into believing that there is something wrong with them. They feel broken and damaged, so much so that they no longer trust their own senses. When one cannot trust one’s own body, reality itself becomes slippery. Every moment in life becomes uncertain. That is what I wanted to talk about.
Reality is slippery in these stories, which loop and overlap thematically (the treatment of women, the entitlement of men) and through certain haunted objects. There’s a sheep on a shoe; there are sheep suffering from the experiments of veterinary students. (The sheep, like humans, just want a life free from pain.) Chung is aware of the suffering of creatures, not just people, and describes all the pain in her stories with a clear, straightforward eye: The facts, the horrors, are never shied from, but she doesn’t linger, either. She writes (and Anton Hur translates) with clarity and precision, and also a sort of simplicity that feels appropriate to the medium of a ghost story, the kind of tale that is repeated and passed down, reshaped and smoothed with every retelling.
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Midnight Timetable
The techniques Chung uses—the narrative distance, the repeating, the simplicity—are deeply effective, giving these stories the feel of fables. She doesn’t linger on the whys or hows of the hauntings, or of the supernatural, because the answer is always based in reality. The woman who is haunted by a fortune-telling sheep is also haunted by fear of her ex. The man lost and isolated in a tunnel needs to embrace connection and himself. The situations may be absurd, peculiar, but the concerns, the emotions, are real and grounded. Also, there are funny bits that make a strange sort of sense, like that ghosts like communication devices. Of course they do. Isn’t a ghost’s whole point communicating something that happened to them?
One note for my fellow softies: I am incapable of reading most stories in which terrible things happen to animals, but I could get through these by clinging to Chung’s empathy and understanding. Even when something very bad happens to a cat, I trusted the cat would have its say. And it does. (“Humans are not good at knowing, in general,” according to the cat.) The cat isn’t an object, but the cat is the bearer of a story, the linchpin of a haunting. And slowly, as Chung’s narrators tell other people’s tales, something becomes clear about these haunted items and creatures: They aren’t being imprisoned, but taken care of.
What becomes of a haunted shoe, a psychic sheep, without somewhere for it to go? What becomes of any object that’s held a story for someone? Too often, the answer is: nothing good. But Chung distills trauma, hope, and the inventiveness of the haunted into an entirely unexpected ending, one that speaks to freedom and kindness and release.
Midnight Timetable is published by Algonquin Books.
Thank you for specifying how the author addresses animal harm. I was very ready to avoid this book when you mentioned the experimentation on sheep. But with certain authors (and certain film directors I find) they can be “trusted” with these topics because of their perspective and love of every part of their creations.