Interview of Bora Chung by Freya Bennett
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 humor, weaves political insight into the supernatural, and crafts narratives that leave readers questioning what’s real and what’s imagined.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
Night shifts and solitude are central to the novel. What draws you to explore stories set in these liminal, often lonely, temporal spaces?
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 in one of the stories.
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?
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 on 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.
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?
I assume my readers have seen and heard everything under the sun and 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.
