Following the more science fiction styled Your Utopia, Bora Chung delivers a series of connected ghost stories in her latest book The Midnight Timetable (once again, effectively translated by Anton Hur). The stories are connected at the meta-level as they are all set in some sort of institute for the storage of haunted or cursed items. But there are also strands of connection between the stories themselves, with objects and ideas threading their way through the different narratives.
The stories are all narrated by an unnamed character and many of these are stories related to them by their sunbae (elder/supervisor). The first story You Can’t Come In Here sets the scene with a mysterious “nondescript” authority figure on the stairs who intones the warning of the title. It establishes the research institute and its internal staircase which sometimes goes to more floors than actually seem to exist and ends in a creepy journey through a seemingly endless tunnel. Other stories involve a cursed shoe, a vengeful cat and a handkerchief.
These are stories of the strange and otherworldly but they are also explorations of Korean family, social dynamics and culture. The story The Handkerchief deals with a family where the mother preferenced the youngest son over her older chidren, another (The Blue Bird) is an old tale of revenge (that also happens to possibly involve the same handkerchief as the first story), in Why Does the Cat a man and his family are haunted by the ghost of the lover he murdered (who also happened to be his best friend’s wife) and her cat.
The Midnight Timetable is a beguiling series of creepy stories from one of Korea’s best. These are stories that feel familiar but do not always go in the direction readers (or sometimes the characters in them) expect. And while they are all very different, the structure that Chung puts around them make them feel of a piece. They may or may not scare readers but they will definitely make them think.
The Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung
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