Midnight Timetable

Bora Chung is a South Korean writer and academic who teaches Russian language and literature at Yonsei University in Seoul. Her path to international literary recognition was unusual: she published short fiction in Korean genre and literary magazines for years without attracting significant attention outside Korea, before the translation of her collection Cursed Bunny by Anton Hur brought her work to an English-speaking audience that was entirely unprepared for it. The International Booker Prize longlist in 2022 was, for many readers, their first encounter with both Chung and the particular tradition of Korean fantastical fiction she represents.

Cursed Bunny collects ten stories that resist easy genre classification. They draw on folklore — particularly Korean and Russian folk traditions, the latter reflecting Chung's academic expertise — on science fiction, on horror, and on the feminist body horror tradition, combining these into something that is none of them precisely but uses all of their tools. 'Cursed Bunny,' the title story, features a luminous rabbit-lamp used as an instrument of family revenge. 'The Head,' one of the collection's most disturbing works, depicts a woman discovering a disembodied head in her apartment that takes up residence and refuses to leave. 'The Embodiment' — a corporate satire in which male executives are given the experience of pregnancy — is darkly funny in its unflinching specificity.

What unifies these diverse modes is a consistent political sensibility and a particular quality of tone: cool, precise, and deadpan in a way that makes the horror more effective by refusing to signal it conventionally. Chung does not build toward the frightening moment in the manner of conventional horror fiction. She presents the disturbing thing matter-of-factly, as if it requires no special framing, and allows the reader to recognize their own discomfort without the text helping them manage it. This technique is related to, but distinct from, the magic realism tradition — it is less interested in wonder than in the social and political systems that produce suffering, and the fantastic elements are tools for making those systems visible.

Her academic work on Russian literature has contributed to her fiction in ways she has discussed: the Russian absurdist tradition, from Gogol through Bulgakov and Kharms, is visible in Chung's dark comedy, and her translation practice — which has brought Russian literary works into Korean — has given her an unusually sophisticated understanding of how cultural materials travel and transform across linguistic borders. A second collection has been anticipated by her international readership with considerable excitement.