The Midnight Timetable

I have been lucky to work in some normal places in my life, but even I have been placed in spooky situations. Working late, I would walk home through the woods known as The Wilderness. Could there be a ghoul or a monster waiting for me behind a tree? I am too cynical to think so, but I could imagine a nutter with a knife. If I worked at the institution found in Bora Chung’s The Midnight Timetable, I would believe more. This is a laboratory that houses haunted items. 

The staff that work the late shift at the Lab often find themselves crossing paths with one another in the canteen at midnight. They have enough time between their nightly rounds to have a quick drink or snack and tell a story. Most of these stories are about staff members, current and past, of how they came to work here, or how they came to leave. Often, they mention the extra floor that appears and disappears as if by choice. They all have a tale to tell. 

The Midnight Timetable is a portmanteau novel, the central laboratory acting as a touchstone for other stories to occur, the Illustrated Man of the piece. The lab itself is spooky enough and something that Chung returns to many times. Objects are kept behind doors; the staff must check that none of them have escaped. Tales are told about how some of the objectives came to be in the lab, or what happens when you take them out. 

You would be hard pressed to call The Midnight Timetable a horror book; it is more a spooky book, although there are elements of violence. This book was originally written in Korean and translated by Anton Hur. The book loses and gains something in the translation. As a UK reader, it feels foreign, the customs and the culture and different, the offhand style and cold writing add to this. I feel like it has been enhanced by being removed once more by being translated. 

The tales roll seamlessly into one another, to the extent it takes a while to realise this is a series of connected short stories and not one tale. At under 200 pages it is not a long book; it was not towards the end that I was able to sync with the style and felt that the stories started to really click as bizarre and eerie.  

A handkerchief from a fable becomes a central piece of a story about a lazy son. The sheep who were experimented on in one story appear again later as items that require the warm glow of the sun as the staff of the laboratory seek to make the objects fade and eventually disappear. 

The Midnight Timetable feels like a very different read and is perfect for the spooky season leading up to Halloween. Does it make sense all the time? No, but a lot of this is on purpose, and you start to understand more as the book progresses. The book is a mood piece, a fascinating read that readers who enjoy something eerily different will enjoy.