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In 2022, South Korean writer and translator Bora Chung was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize for Cursed Bunny, her acclaimed short-story collection translated by Anton Hur. Spanning magical realism, horror and science fiction, the book showcased Chung’s inventive use of fantastical tropes to respond to the abuses carried out by powerful forces in contemporary society.

A similar critique runs through Chung’s latest work The Midnight Timetable, also translated by Hur but presented as a novel (the US edition is subtitled “A Novel in Ghost Stories”). It consists of seven interlinked tales, bound together by a sinister research facility. A blind sunbae (senior colleague) regales the unnamed narrator, a night guard at the research centre, with spooky anecdotes about former employees. She discovers other macabre tales while patrolling the building.

The claustrophobic opener, “You Can’t Come in Here”, follows Chan, an introverted queer man forced into conversion therapy by his family. After finishing his overnight security shift, he ignores the stranger who tries to block his entry to the institute’s car park, jumps on his motorcycle and rides off, only to become trapped in a tunnel where the distance to the exit keeps increasing. Chan’s brush with mortality unexpectedly opens a path to self-acceptance.

Several characters in the book receive phone calls predicting their death. Chan is asked when he’d like his coffin to be delivered. In “Cursed Sheep”, DSP, who specialises in streaming paranormal phenomena, receives a call inquiring “what time will you board the hearse?”

Like much of Chung’s work, one of the stories explores gendered violence and the subjugation of women

Other stories are set in the distant past. Fairytale retribution is meted out in “Blue Bird”, inspired by an account in the Historical Records of the Three Kingdoms, which Chung discovered in the database of Korean history. A captain murders a noble family, but their infant daughter survives and, raised by a poor couple, becomes a talented seamstress. Commissioned by her enemy’s son to embroider a satin handkerchief for his bride-to-be, she is imprisoned when he decides to take her as a concubine. The wedding is cursed; a flock of birds take revenge on the captain and his family. Like several of Chung’s stories, it explores gendered violence and the subjugation of women.

In the harrowing “Silence of the Sheep”, the facility’s deputy director recalls being followed by prophetic sheep, victims of animal testing covered in gruesome wounds. She is missing the fingers of her right hand after a work accident, and the sheep are protective towards her, one even saving her from a rapist.

Cursed items recur as potent motifs — from the embroidered handkerchief to a single tennis shoe — stored in numbered rooms in the labyrinthine building. In “Sunning Day”, the final story, these items are laid on the lawn, exposed to the weather and examined for changes, until the dead who haunt them are freed or simply melt away. The narrator delights in the banality of the “mismatched objects”, their strangeness dissolving in daylight, reminding her of “a lost and found center”.

Chung tells us in an afterword that the title came from an English sign in the empty ticket office of her local bus terminal: “these two words in juxtaposition felt very poetic and mysterious to me”. In an interview with Ramona magazine, Chung described the book as “a Covid novel”, shaped by the period’s “atmosphere of fear and emptiness.” Her characters grapple with terror and isolation as they confront various existential crises: sexual identity, poor decisions, dysfunctional families and financial woe.

The Midnight Timetable lacks the verve and sophistication of her earlier work, and a few nuances are lost in English — at one point “carer” is rendered as “caretaker”. Still, several stories have a satisfying feminist edge, and Hur’s translation captures their eerie tone and quietly unsettling atmosphere.

The Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur, Dialogue Books £14.99/Algonquin Books $18.99, 208 pages

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