“Midnight Timetable was not a deadline or a chore for me but a really fun amusement park of a book to work on. To write an entire book of ghost stories! I had so much fun writing it.”
– Bora Chung
South Korean author Bora Chung—who wrote Your Utopia and Cursed Bunny (shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize)—loves ghost stories. A lot. So it’s no surprise her latest collection of short stories, Midnight Timetable: A Novel in Ghost Stories, focuses on exactly that.
But what you may not know is that Chung loves ghost stories so much, she writes them whenever she walks through that fabled land of purgatory known as writer’s block and recommends other writers to try it out.
“I love hearing [ghost stories], reading them, and writing them,” wrote Chung in the book’s afterward. “Once I start thinking about [the point at which the] appearance of the ghost would prove the scariest, the writing starts to flow again.”
Chung’s sources for her inspiration runs the gamut. Her stories derive from urban legends, television programs, social media, Korean history, and even things that she fears, such as driving at night. She wanted to avoid writing a horror novel since long ghost stories tend to be either mysteries or thrillers.
“I wanted to write a real ghost story, not a mystery or a thriller masquerading as one,” wrote Chung. “And that’s how I came up with this form of interconnected short stories.”
“Interconnected” may be an understatement. Chung’s ghost stories revolve around haunted objects stored in an abandoned building called the Institute, where these objects are researched. The Institute itself is haunted, as sightings have been made of: a nondescript man who suddenly appears in front of people to let them know, “You can’t come in here”; a cat with a nail sticking out of its neck that wanders its halls, ready to regale anyone working there the story of its demise; and maybe a ghostly, abused, and yet, prophetic sheep greeting you in the Institute’s stairwell. Even the blind are witnesses to the strange sightings there.
The narrator is an employee who works the graveyard shift as part of the security detail, to check and make sure all the doors in the Institute are locked according to a midnight timetable. She relates the stories told to her primarily by her blind sunbae (a Korean word denoting someone who is more experienced) but also by the Institute’s deputy director. For example, the opening chapter “You Can’t Come in Here,” covers the strange experiences previous employees had on the graveyard shift, such as Chan, who ignores the nondescript man’s warnings and nearly ends up dying in an endless tunnel.
More often than not, some of these stories have allusions to specific objects at the Institute, whose origin tale becomes fleshed out in separate chapters. One notable story involves the journey of a pretty white handkerchief with the stitching of a bird on a flowering bough. It explains the traumatic experience one family went through while they were in possession of it, but Chung later fleshes the story out to explain how the handkerchief really got cursed by diving into Korea’s violent past.
As fans of Chung are well aware, her devotion to social activism is imbued in the narrative through the deep empathy she shows towards victims—such as women, gay people, disabled people, and even animals that have undergone testing.
These stories will delight readers who enjoy ghost stories, but these accounts are not simply meant to give readers a fun scare and a tidy resolution. Rather, Chung’s intention seems to go deeper by showing the long-lasting horrors humanity has wrought through the social commentary she interlaces into each chapter. Some of these objects never find a happy ending, and if they do, the healing happens gradually and with time. In that way, Chung seems to be saying, the ghosts and haunted objects have a lot in common with the living.
