Freya Bennett interviews Bora Chung about her new book THE MIDNIGHT TIMETABLE for Ramona Magazine.
24 September, 2025
Bora Chung on blending horror, humour, and political commentary in Korean fiction
Bora Chung, the acclaimed South Korean author behind Cursed Bunny and Your Utopia, is known for her uncanny ability to blend horror, dark humour, and sharp social commentary. In her latest collection, The Midnight Timetable, she explores the absurdities and fears of modern life, drawing on haunted objects, eerie night shifts, and liminal spaces that feel almost alive. In this interview, Chung discusses how she balances bone-chilling suspense with wry humour, weaves political insight into the supernatural, and crafts narratives that leave readers questioning what’s real and what’s imagined.
Q.
Your writing in The Midnight Timetable is described as both bone-chilling and wryly funny. How do you approach balancing these seemingly opposite tones, and what draws you to this combination in your storytelling?
A.
People are absurd. Life is full of absurd moments. They can be funny, scary, confusing, annoying, or all of the above. I believe human beings have the capacity to perceive and sense a lot of things at the same time, and I try to do justice to that complex ability. After all, that’s how we’ve survived for so long as a species.
Q.
Critics have noted the deeply political layers beneath your horror. How do you weave societal commentary into supernatural or uncanny narratives without it feeling didactic?
A.
I do as much research as I can. Very often, reality is more cruel and much more horrific than any ghost story I could possibly imagine. I constantly feel threatened by gender-based violence. I think most Korean women feel this way: that every moment, we are evading gender-based violence, and surviving in this society just by pure chance. I can’t be didactic when I am scared.
Q.
The labyrinthine research facility in the novel feels almost like a character itself. How do you conceive of spaces in your stories, and what role does architecture or environment play in shaping tension?
A.
I don’t have any sense of direction. I get lost all the time and I am a horrible, horrible driver. So I get confused in any kind of architecture or geography, no matter how straightforward the map is. That’s where all the tension comes from. Because I’m lost. Again. Help.
Q.
The cursed objects in your book often reveal human flaws, fears, or regrets. How do you see the interplay between supernatural elements and psychological realism in your work?
A.
I grew up with stories about magical objects from the medieval Korean annals such as The History of The Three Kingdoms and The Legends of The Three Kingdoms. There are whole stories about a magical flute that could 'calm ten thousand waves', or a self-playing magical drum that warns the country of the approaching enemies. And there’s awe, excitement, people’s hopes and expectations attached to these objects. I took ordinary objects used by ordinary people and made them haunted instead of magical. We all have objects with sentimental value, so I just added a little haunting to them.
Q.
Night shifts and solitude are central to the novel. What draws you to explore stories set in these liminal, often lonely, temporal spaces?
A.
The Midnight Timetable is a Covid novel, if such a thing exists. The atmosphere of fear and emptiness during Covid left a lasting impression in my mind.
The initial idea for the haunted institute came from the empty university buildings in 2020. I was still teaching back then. Since Korea didn’t have a complete lockdown like the rest of the world, I had to go to school from time-to-time for department meetings and other administrative stuff, firmly wearing a mask and armed with loads of hand sanitizers. All the classes had moved online and the school felt deserted without the students. It was an eerie kind of emptiness, fraught with fear and anxiety. It was the opposite of the usual peace and quiet during semester breaks or holidays.
The very title comes from a sign at the bus terminal near where I live. For some reason the night bus ticket office had the sign 'Midnight timetable' in English, but it was closed and there were no night buses running. And of course the bus terminal itself was empty, although it was technically open. I inserted this scene into one of the stories.
Q.
The senior guard’s tales are stories within the story. What fascinates you about nested narratives, and how do you decide which tales deserve to be told inside your larger narrative?
A.
I had a friend in graduate school, an American, who used to teach English as a second language. She told me that when it comes to writing, Americans usually start with the main argument, while Koreans (and probably Asians) begin by explaining the circumstances in which they are starting to write. (See? I started answering this question by explaining the circumstances in which I first heard about cultural differences in writing styles!) So as a Korean, I am most comfortable with the form of nested narratives. The complex structure is fun to work with.
Also, ghost stories are always a variation of a nested narrative. There is a living person or persons experiencing the paranormal phenomena, and then there is the ghost, who in turn has their own story.
Q.
Your prose often leaves readers questioning what is real and what is imagined. How do you craft suspense and uncertainty so that the uncanny feels both inevitable and shocking?
A.
I assume my readers have seen and heard everything under the sun, and that they will never be even mildly surprised, no matter how hard I try. We are flooded with videos and special effects, and there’s only so much I can do with some letters printed on paper.
In The Midnight Timetable I wanted to talk about trauma and its aftermath. Members of the minority, such as Chan, who is gay, and the vice director, who is a woman, are more susceptible to trauma. And they are often gaslit into believing that there is something wrong with them. They feel broken and damaged, so much so that they no longer trust their own senses. When one cannot trust one’s own body, reality itself becomes slippery. Every moment in life becomes uncertain. That is what I wanted to talk about.
Related
$29.99 AUD
The Midnight Timetable
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 URSULA K. LE GUIN PRIZE
A FINALIST FOR THE LOCUS AWARD FOR BEST TRANSLATED NOVEL
Equal parts bone-chilling, wryly funny, and deeply political, The Midnight Timetable is a masterful work of literary horror from one of our time’s greatest imaginations.
In a labyrinthine research facility, 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, an unnamed protagonist begins their night shift under the watchful eye of the building’s enigmatic senior guard.
Each evening, as the fluorescent lights hum and the silence grows heavier, the guard shares another tale of cursed objects and lives unspooled by vengeance, sorrow, or revelation. But these are not mere ghost stories. They’re warnings. Lessons. Or, perhaps, confessions ...
As the nights stretch on and reality frays, our protagonist starts to suspect that the building itself is alive with malevolent intent and that the objects they guard aren’t just cursed.
They’re waiting. Watching.
$29.99 AUD
Cursed Bunny
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE AND WINNER OF A PEN/HEIM TRANSLATION GRANT.
A woman is haunted by her own bodily waste. A pregnant woman is told she must find a father for her unborn baby or face horrific consequences. A young monster, forced to fight, discovers the extent of his power.
This genre-defying collection of short stories blurs the lines between magical realism, horror, and science fiction. Using elements of the fantastic and surreal, Chung exposes the very real horrors and cruelties of patriarchy and capitalism in modern society, gliding effortlessly from terrifying to wryly humorous in a skilful translation by the acclaimed Anton Hur.
$27.99 AUD
Your Utopia
Test for no-sync function.
By the internationally acclaimed author of Cursed Bunny, in another thrilling translation from the Korean by Anton Hur, Your Utopia is full of tales of loss and discovery, idealism and dystopia, death and immortality. “Nothing concentrates the mind like Chung’s terrors, which will shrivel you to a bouillon cube of your most primal instincts” (Vulture), yet these stories are suffused with Chung's inimitable wry humour and surprisingly tender moments, too — often between unexpected subjects.
In ‘The Center for Immortality Research’, a low-level employee runs herself ragged planning a fancy gala for donors, only to be blamed for a crime she witnessed during the event, under the noses of the mysterious celebrity benefactors hoping to live forever. But she can’t be fired — no one can. In ‘A Song for Sleep’, a tender, one-sided love blooms in the AI-elevator of an apartment complex; as in, the elevator develops a profound affection for one of the residents. In ‘Seeds’, we see the final frontier of capitalism’s destruction of the planet and the GMO companies who rule the agricultural industry in this bleak future, but nature has ways of creeping back to life.
Chung’s writing is “haunting, funny, gross, terrifying — and yet when we reach the end, we just want more” (Alexander Chee). If you haven’t yet experienced the fruits of this singular imagination, Your Utopia is waiting.
Bora Chung
Bora Chung is a writer of speculative fiction and a translator of contemporary Russian and Polish literature. She has published three full-length novels and four short story collections in Korean. As of 2025, five of her works have been translated by Anton Hur and published in English; the first, Cursed Bunny, was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize and the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature.