Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Bora Chung, the South Korean author and translator of the National Book Award finalist and Booker Prize-shortlisted Cursed Bunny, is set to release her latest book of ghost stories next week.
The Midnight Timetable will be released in English on September 30 and has been translated by Anton Hur.
The book, billed as ‘a novel in ghost stories’, is set inside the ambiguous and bureaucratic ‘Institute’ and follows a new employee tasked with night-watch duty.
Rules are issued: do not answer the telephones, do not open doors after hours, and do not look directly at shadows.
From there, the novel unravels in interconnected stories that blend horror, surrealism, and sharp social commentary. Each story features a haunted object or creature.
A pair of cursed sneakers refuses to let its wearer rest.
A bloodstained handkerchief carries the weight of a sibling’s jealousy.
A cat observes its owner’s life with quiet menace.
These apparitions and artefacts lead into examinations of domestic abuse, animal testing, conversion therapy, and other brutalities hidden beneath ordinary life.
Reviews ahead of publication describe the book as eerie, fragmented, and deliberately disorienting. One reviewer praised its layering of the supernatural with social critique, noting that Bora uses ghosts not for shock but for unease, with corridors, staircases, and offices that bend logic.
At just 208 pages long, The Midnight Timetable is shorter than Bora’s previous translated work and is structured as a sequence of linked tales rather than a single linear narrative, giving it the feel of an experimental novel.
Bora, who teaches Russian literature and science fiction in South Korea, has been gaining international recognition for blending speculative tropes with biting observations about politics, family and society.
The book will be released in hardcover and e-book formats on September 30 in the US, with international editions to follow.
