MIDNIGHT TIMETABLE

A worker at a research center for haunted objects tells a series of ghost stories to her underling.

In Korean, the word to denote a senior colleague is “sunbae.” In Chung’s “novel in ghost stories,” the first-person narrator—an employee at “the Institute,” a place where researchers study supernatural items—relies on her sunbae not just for instructions on how to be a proper employee (turn off your phone at work; never look behind you) but for storytelling. The stories feature the employees and objects of the Institute, and images and dialogue loop and recur across the book. Often, an object appears in one story only to have its haunted origin revealed in a subsequent narrative. In “Cursed Sheep,” for example, a paranormal content creator thinks getting a job at the Institute will skyrocket him to a massive following; instead, he suffers a hallucinatory trip through the building, dodging sheep in the stairwells and bugs underfoot that are not quite what they seem. In “Silence of the Sheep,” the sunbae tells the story of the Institute’s deputy director, who once worked as a fortune teller with the help of a prognosticating sheep who also serves as an experimental research subject at a local veterinary college. The recurrences and doublings contribute to the atmosphere of genuine dread, as do the narratives’ structures, which are often stories within stories within stories. The labyrinthine construction mirrors the Institute itself, the shifting mystery at the center of the book. One of Chung’s great strengths has always been social critique, and these tales cleverly examine the ways that vulnerable people—queer people, divorced women, the disabled, people saddled with debt—are society’s “ghosts,” who, rather than haunt others after death, must fight for justice and survival in the here and now.

Inventive, layered, and deliciously weird.