Midnight Timetable - by Bora Chung (Paperback)

About the Book

"The acclaimed Korean horror and sci-fi writer's goosebump-inducing new book follows an employee on the night shift at the Institute. They soon learn why some employees don't last long at the center. The handkerchief in Room 302 once belonged to the late mother of two sons, whose rivalry imbues the handkerchief with undue power and unravels the lives of those who seek to possess it. Meanwhile a live-streaming, ghost-chasing employee steals a cursed sneaker down the hall, but later finds he can't escape its tread. The cat in Room 206 begins to reveal the crimes of its former family, wanting to understand its own path to the Institute's dimly lit halls. But Chung's haunted institute isn't just a chilling place to play. As in her astounding collections Cursed bunny and Your utopia, these violent allegories subtly excavate the horrors of animal cosmetic testing, 'conversion therapy,' domestic abuse, and late-stage capitalism. Equal parts bone-chilling, wryly funny, and deeply political, Midnight timetable is a masterful work of literary horror from one of our time's greatest imaginations"

Book Synopsis

*A FINALIST FOR THE LOCUS AWARD FOR BEST TRANSLATED NOVEL*

"Like the objects collected in this deliciously haunting book, Midnight Timetable will absorb you in the shadows of its imagination, marvelous oddness, humor, and heart." --Gerardo Sámano Córdova

From the author and translator of the National Book Award finalist and Booker Prize shortlisted Cursed Bunny, comes a novel-in-ghost-stories, set in a mysterious research center that houses cursed objects, where those who open the wrong door might find it's disappeared behind them, or that the echoing footsteps they're running from are their own...

The acclaimed Korean horror and sci-fi writer's goosebump-inducing new book follows an employee on the night shift at the Institute. They soon learn why some employees don't last long at the center. The handkerchief in Room 302 once belonged to the late mother of two sons, whose rivalry imbues the handkerchief with undue power and unravels the lives of those who seek to possess it. Meanwhile a live-streaming, ghost-chasing employee steals a cursed sneaker down the hall, but later finds he can't escape its tread. The cat in Room 206 begins to reveal the crimes of its former family, wanting to understand its own path to the Institute's dimly lit halls.

But Chung's haunted institute isn't just a chilling place to play. As in her astounding collections Cursed Bunny and Your Utopia, these violent allegories subtly excavate the horrors of animal cosmetic testing, "conversion therapy," domestic abuse, and late-stage capitalism. Equal parts bone-chilling, wryly funny, and deeply political, Midnight Timetable is a masterful work of literary horror from one of our time's greatest imaginations.

Review Quotes

"Midnight Timetable does what the best of horror, sci-fi, and other genre writing can achieve: It renders our present realities strange again."--Foreign Policy

"Seven chilling, thrilling interlinked stories capture the hair-raising experiences of current and former employees of the mysterious Institute...Beyond superb entertainment."--Booklist, *STARRED REVIEW*

"Midnight Timetable is as steeped in the fantastical and whimsical as it is in the horrors of everyday life."--Electric Literature

"Each chapter reclaims the joyous fright of sharing ghost stories and urban legends around the campfire....Chung knows how to entertain and unnerve simultaneously, while tucking in commentary on the modern world....A must-have socially aware horror novel..." --Library Journal *STARRED REVIEW*

"With a bone-dry wit and biting allegorical edge, expertly captured in Hur's translation, Chung turns the haunted-object trope into a vehicle for radical empathy and sharp critique. Part fable, part ghost story, and part social commentary, this is a beautiful and devastating excavation of how people make sense of the world's violence and tragedies."--Publishers Weekly, *STARRED REVIEW*

"Clever, scary and wickedly funny. I inhaled Bora Chung's book of ghost stories and then slept with the light on!" --Avni Doshi, author Burnt Sugar

"Electrifying. A feast of a book. Strange, hypnotic and audacious."--Irenosen Okojie, author of Speak Gigantular

"For anybody who has ever pondered the Backrooms or visited the SCP Foundation, Midnight Timetable must be on your TBR." --LitHub's Most Anticipated Sci-fi, Fantasty, and Horror Books

"Like the objects collected in this deliciously haunting book, Midnight Timetable will absorb you in the shadows of its imagination, marvelous oddness, humor, and heart. It's a wild midnight tour of a uniquely brilliant and exquisitely demented world, terrifying and enchanting--a world I did not want to leave!"--Gerardo Sámano Córdova, author of Monstrilio

"How can Bora Chung tickle me, delight me while dropping me deep into uneasiness? Why am I giggling while looking for new shadows over my shoulder? These ghost stories take what's familiar and give them very human dimensions--a lover's betrayal, a mother's love, a son's greed, or a worker's simple curiosity--so that they mist off the page and leave the real world hazy and askew when we look up. I left this book respecting the untold histories of objects and I will never look at tennis shoes again without thinking of sheep."--'Pemi Aguda, author of Ghostroots

"I love the creatures who populate the Haunted Institute of Bora Chung's mind--handkerchiefs with vendettas, jackets that weep in marbles, wounded, oracular sheep. Midnight Timetable is enigmatic, wild, and fun, even while making deep and provocative points about the dark joys suffering makes available. A fascinating novel of shifting realities centered by a steady, humane heart. Bora Chung is a master of concocting dreamscapes that linger." --Marie-Helene Bertino, author of Beautyland

Praise for Bora Chung and Anton Hur:

"Bora Chung's Cursed Bunny mines those places where what we fear is true and what is true meet and separate and re-meet. The resulting stories are indelible. Haunting, funny, gross, terrifying--and yet when we reach the end, we just want more." --Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

"If you were the kind of child who was enthralled by Scary Stories to Read in the Dark, Bora Chung writes for you. Like the work of Carmen Maria Machado and Aoko Matsuda, Chung's stories are so wonderfully, blisteringly strange and powerful that it's almost impossible to put Cursed Bunny down. In short, this collection may, in fact, be a cursed object in the best possible way." --Kelly Link, bestselling author of Get In Trouble

"Disturbing, chilling, wrenching, and absolute genius. I wanted Chung to write a story about a reader getting a deep look inside her fantastic swirling mind. I had to take breaks and gulps of air before plunging back into each story. Magnetic, eerie, immensely important." --Frances Cha, author of If I Had Your Face

"Anton Hur's nimble translation manages to capture the tricky magic of Chung's voice -- its wry humor and overarching coolness broken by sudden, thrilling dips into passages of vivid description. Even as Chung presents a catalog of grotesqueries that range from unsettling to seared-into-the-brain disturbing, her power is in restraint." --Violet Kupersmith, The New York Times Book Review

"[These] stories are beyond imagination: breathtaking, wild, crazy, the most original fiction I have ever encountered. ...each more astounding than the last." --Louisa Ermelino, Publishers Weekly

"Chung builds out her stories with imagination, absurdity and a dry sense of humor, all applied with X-Acto knife precision, but what stands out about her fantastical tales is not how different they are from one another so much as how much remains the same." ―Alexandra Kleeman, The New York Times Book Review

"Cool, brilliantly demented K-horror--just the way I like it!" --Ed Park, author of Personal Days-----

"Beautiful, eerie stories that are unpredictable and sprawl endlessly."--Kang Hwa-gil, author of Another Person

"The keen insights into a society and the nonstop pacing of the folk tales kept me on the edge of my seat."--Kim Bo-Young, author of National Book Award-longlisted On the Origin of Species and Other Stories

About the Author

Bora Chung is a writer and translator whose works include the National Book Award finalist and International Booker Prize-shortlisted Cursed Bunny and Your Utopia. She has an MA in Russian Studies from Yale University and a PhD in Slavic literature from Indiana University. She has taught Russian language and literature and science fiction at Yonsei University and translates modern literary works from Russian and Polish into Korean.

Anton Hur is the author of Toward Eternity and the translator of many iconic Korean SFF works including Bora Chung's Cursed Bunny, Kim Choyeop's If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light, Lee Young-do's The Bird That Drinks Tears, Kim Sung-il's Blood of the Old Kings, and Park Seolyeon's A Magical Girl Retires.