Midnight Table Review by Bora Chung – Wicked Stories from the Graveyard Shit | Horror books

HeyYour fears turn brutal when they have nowhere to go. South Korean author Bora Chung’s new short story collection plays with old horror tropes: endless corridors and twisting staircases, exits that lead you deeper, and a phone that rings and rings (don’t pick up). This is the kind of story that drunk kids trade in the dark.

Set in a research facility known only as “The Institute,” a repository of cursed and haunted objects, Chung’s tales come from the building’s core staff — warnings and rumors of the night shift. This may be a reference to Stephen King’s first collection, 1978’s Night Shift, which is still fantastic.

The objects in Chung’s institute seem ordinary—a single shoe, an embroidered handkerchief—but they carry a spectral, fatal weight. Some wait quietly, others don’t (be sure to lock your phone away: “Ghosts are like communicators”). Each room has its own purpose, and each object has its own story. The building is the book. The book is the building.

Horror writers have long used story collections as maps and floor plans. King has spent five decades charting Maine’s non-Himmelian corners, one story at a time. Mariana Enriquez haunts and haunts the torn-down neighborhoods of Buenos Aires. Ray Bradbury has etched a diagram into the body itself, a fatal mapping into the man depicted. And beware Room 63 of the troubled Daisy Johnson Guest House (hotel); You can check out any time you want, but can you leave?

Landscapes, cities, buildings and flesh. The formats vary, but all are versions of the more flexible horror structure: the haunted house. This spectral lineage is evident in the midnight table. The institute claimed an “old house at the end of an alley” and refitted it to conduct clinical experiments of a mysterious and sinister kind. The building has a gruesome backstory, and is home to a chatty ghost cat that follows you around on your tours. People who work the graveyard shift are already marked by violence and social exclusion: survivors of coercive control and gay conversion practices. They are safer here, among the ruins of the dead, than in the living world; Already attuned to the ways in which reality can be distorted and minds colonized.

Chung is part of a growing group of novelists who use horror and absurdity to expose the true horrors and absurdities of modern work: Ling Ma, Sayaka Murata, Ottessa Moshfegh, Haley Butler, Tehila Hakimi, Olga Ravn, Ben Bester. The office, the factory floor, the laboratory, the corporate park: these are the new haunted houses, spaces where the slow grind of instability corrodes the soul, burdened by the curse of unbreakable casualness. Chung’s narrator is new to the institute, stepping into the shoes of a single mother who has finally managed to save enough money to fulfill her dream: “sleeping under the same roof with her children every night.”

The Midnight Schedule reads like a reflection of the author’s 2021 song “Cursed Rabbit.” That collection, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and also translated by Anton Hoare, traverses similar territory: violent inheritance, and capitalist critique. But its title story boiled down the book’s full power to one thing: a rabbit-shaped lamp that was also a beacon of vengeance. The midnight schedule spreads and dissipates its energy. There are as many shades here as there are things: the mental rot of gambling, the quiet cruelty of fratricide, the black-market organ trade. The cursed rabbit had a score to settle; This book feels haunted by residual anger.

The institute looks like a comfortable container. He never fully captures Chung’s attention. Her collection is most vivid when further removed in tone, time and geography (the folkloric bluebird is a standout; so is a tale about a body-snatching sheep who can predict the lottery). The results were closer to the “monster of the week” formula seen in the early seasons of The X-Files: each story represented a new case, and the Institute was reduced to a shadowy and sinister backlot, overseen by equally mysterious and sinister men. “It’s not that he had no characteristics at all,” Chung writes of one executive. “You could say that it being completely nondescript was a defining characteristic.”

The midnight table thus becomes a victim of its own architecture. “I hope each story feels like a visit to a different laboratory room at the institute,” Chung wrote in an author’s note. This is both the promise and the curse of this group. The book is the building; The building is the book.