Our fears turn feral when they have nowhere to go. South Korean author Bora Chung\u2019s new short story collection plays with old horror tropes: endless corridors and looped staircases, exits that only lead you deeper, a phone that\u00a0rings and rings (don\u2019t pick up). The kind of stories dare-drunk children trade in the dark.<\/p>\n
Set in a research facility known\u00a0only\u00a0as \u201cthe Institute\u201d, a repository of\u00a0cursed and haunted objects, Chung\u2019s tales come from the building\u2019s skeleton staff \u2013 warnings and gossip from the night shift. It\u2019s a\u00a0nod, perhaps, to Stephen King\u2019s debut collection, 1978\u2019s still brilliant\u00a0Night\u00a0Shift.<\/p>\n
The objects in Chung\u2019s Institute seem ordinary \u2013 a single shoe, an embroidered handkerchief \u2013 but they carry spectral and murderous weight. Some wait quietly, most don\u2019t (be sure\u00a0to lock your phone away: \u201cghosts like communication devices\u201d). Every room has its own object, and every object its own story. The building is the book; the book is the building.<\/p>\n
Horror writers have long used story collections as maps and floorplans. King has spent five decades charting the unheimlich corners of Maine, fable by dark fable. Mariana Enriquez haunts, and is haunted by, the ragged neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires. Ray Bradbury etched a blueprint on the body itself, a mortal cartography in The Illustrated Man. And beware room 63 in Daisy Johnson\u2019s restless guesthouse (The Hotel); you can check out any time you like, but can you ever leave?<\/p>\n
Landscapes, cities, buildings, flesh. The shapes differ, but all are versions of horror\u2019s most resilient structure: the haunted house. That spectral lineage is explicit in The Midnight Timetable. The Institute has claimed an \u201cold\u00a0house at the end of an alley\u201d and refitted it for clinical experimentation of some vague and sinister sort. The building carries a grisly backstory, and is home to a voluble ghost cat that trails you on your rounds. The people who work the graveyard shift are already marked by violence and social exclusion: survivors of coercive control and gay conversion practices. They are far safer here, among the wakeful relics of the dead, than in the living world; already attuned to the ways reality can\u00a0be warped, brains colonised.<\/p>\n
Chung is part of a growing cohort of\u00a0novelists using horror to expose the real horrors\u00a0and absurdities of modern work<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Chung is part of a growing cohort of\u00a0novelists who are using horror and\u00a0absurdism to expose the real horrors\u00a0and absurdities of modern work: Ling Ma, Sayaka Murata, Ottessa\u00a0Moshfegh, Halle Butler, Tehila Hakimi, Olga Ravn, Ben Pester. The office, the factory floor, the lab, the corporate park: these are the new haunted houses, spaces where the slow grind of precarity erodes the soul, heavy with the unbreakable curse of\u00a0casualisation. Chung\u2019s narrator is new to the Institute, replacing a single mother who has finally saved enough money to live her dream: to \u201csleep under the same roof with her kids every night\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Midnight Timetable reads like an inversion of the author\u2019s 2021 cult hit Cursed Bunny. That collection, shortlisted for the International Booker and also translated by Anton Hur, crossed similar terrain: violent inheritances, capitalist critique. But its\u00a0title story distilled the full force of\u00a0the book into a single object: a rabbit-shaped lamp that was also a beacon of vengeance. The Midnight Timetable diffuses and dissipates its energy. There are as many tangents here as there are objects: the mind-rot of gambling, the quiet cruelties of sibling favouritism, the black-market organ trade. Cursed Bunny had a score to settle; this book feels haunted by\u00a0residual furies.<\/p>\n
And the Institute feels like a\u00a0convenient container. It never fully\u00a0holds Chung\u2019s attention; her collection\u00a0is most alive when it strays furthest in tone, time and geography (the folkloric Blue Bird is a standout; so\u00a0is a tale about a bodysnatching sheep that can predict the lottery). What results is something akin to the \u201cmonster-of-the-week\u201d format from early seasons of television\u2019s The X-Files: each story a new case, and the\u00a0Institute reduced to a vague and sinister backdrop, overseen by equally vague and sinister dudes. \u201cIt\u2019s not that he had no characteristics whatsoever,\u201d Chung writes of an executive. \u201cYou\u00a0could say his being exceedingly nondescript was a characteristic.\u201d<\/p>\n
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And so The Midnight Timetable becomes a victim of its own architecture. \u201cI hope each story felt like visiting a different lab room in the Institute,\u201d Chung writes in an author\u2019s note. That is both the promise and the curse of this collection. The book is the\u00a0building; the building is the book.<\/p>\n