The latest novel from the Reasons to Stay Alive author Matt Haig begins with an octogenarian man having a heart attack. Former business magnate Wilbur Budd is already feeling a bit peculiar when he receives a phone call from his ex-wife, Maggie, who he hasn’t heard from in years. “I wanted to hear your voice,” she tells him wistfully. Minutes after getting off the phone, Wilbur collapses on his front lawn and dies.

What sounds like the end of a story is, in fact, the beginning as Wilbur finds himself standing on a train platform with his mind “reverberating as if from some giant cosmic cymbal crash”. A train arrives and a woman disembarks and introduces herself as Agnes. She is, she says, the ghost of a bookseller who once ran a shop Wilbur visited as a child. She will be guiding him in a voyage through his past, pausing at formative moments including his brother’s premature death and Wilbur and Maggie’s honeymoon in Venice. “This is death,” Agnes tells him. “Where your life flashes before your eyes. This is how it happens. Fast and slow. Like life … ”

With shades of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, The Midnight Train is a cosy feelgood tale, despite the ostensibly bleak themes of death and the afterlife. The narrator is the Happy Valley and McMafia actor James Norton who brings a rare softness and gentle longing to his performance. As Wilbur reflects on times gone by, he comes to realise the things in life he could have done better.

Available via Canongate, 8hr 36min

Further listening

You With the Sad Eyes
Christina Applegate, Headline, 8hr 27min
A candid memoir in which the actor best known as Kelly Bundy from Married … With Children reflects on her childhood raised by a heroin-addicted mother, becoming the family breadwinner as a child actor, and her recent diagnosis with multiple sclerosis. Read by the author.

Birnam Wood
Eleanor Catton, Audible Studios, 12hr 47min
Saskia Maarleveld reads this smartly plotted eco-thriller from the Booker prize-winning author of The Luminaries. It tells of a guerrilla gardening collective in New Zealand, named after the moving forest in Macbeth, who set their sights on a plot of land owned by an American billionaire.

Our fears turn feral when they have nowhere to go. South Korean author Bora Chung’s new short story collection plays with old horror tropes: endless corridors and looped staircases, exits that only lead you deeper, a phone that rings and rings (don’t pick up). The kind of stories dare-drunk children trade in the dark.

Set in a research facility known only as “the Institute”, a repository of cursed and haunted objects, Chung’s tales come from the building’s skeleton staff – warnings and gossip from the night shift. It’s a nod, perhaps, to Stephen King’s debut collection, 1978’s still brilliant Night Shift.

The objects in Chung’s Institute seem ordinary – a single shoe, an embroidered handkerchief – but they carry spectral and murderous weight. Some wait quietly, most don’t (be sure to lock your phone away: “ghosts like communication devices”). Every room has its own object, and every object its own story. The building is the book; the book is the building.

Horror writers have long used story collections as maps and floorplans. King has spent five decades charting the unheimlich corners of Maine, fable by dark fable. Mariana Enriquez haunts, and is haunted by, the ragged neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires. Ray Bradbury etched a blueprint on the body itself, a mortal cartography in The Illustrated Man. And beware room 63 in Daisy Johnson’s restless guesthouse (The Hotel); you can check out any time you like, but can you ever leave?

Landscapes, cities, buildings, flesh. The shapes differ, but all are versions of horror’s most resilient structure: the haunted house. That spectral lineage is explicit in The Midnight Timetable. The Institute has claimed an “old house at the end of an alley” and refitted it for clinical experimentation of some vague and sinister sort. The building carries a grisly backstory, and is home to a voluble ghost cat that trails you on your rounds. The people who work the graveyard shift are already marked by violence and social exclusion: survivors of coercive control and gay conversion practices. They are far safer here, among the wakeful relics of the dead, than in the living world; already attuned to the ways reality can be warped, brains colonised.

Chung is part of a growing cohort of novelists who are using horror and absurdism to expose the real horrors and absurdities of modern work: Ling Ma, Sayaka Murata, Ottessa Moshfegh, Halle Butler, Tehila Hakimi, Olga Ravn, Ben Pester. The office, the factory floor, the lab, the corporate park: these are the new haunted houses, spaces where the slow grind of precarity erodes the soul, heavy with the unbreakable curse of casualisation. Chung’s narrator is new to the Institute, replacing a single mother who has finally saved enough money to live her dream: to “sleep under the same roof with her kids every night”.

The Midnight Timetable reads like an inversion of the author’s 2021 cult hit Cursed Bunny. That collection, shortlisted for the International Booker and also translated by Anton Hur, crossed similar terrain: violent inheritances, capitalist critique. But its title story distilled the full force of the book into a single object: a rabbit-shaped lamp that was also a beacon of vengeance. The Midnight Timetable diffuses and dissipates its energy. There are as many tangents here as there are objects: the mind-rot of gambling, the quiet cruelties of sibling favouritism, the black-market organ trade. Cursed Bunny had a score to settle; this book feels haunted by residual furies.

And the Institute feels like a convenient container. It never fully holds Chung’s attention; her collection is most alive when it strays furthest in tone, time and geography (the folkloric Blue Bird is a standout; so is a tale about a bodysnatching sheep that can predict the lottery). What results is something akin to the “monster-of-the-week” format from early seasons of television’s The X-Files: each story a new case, and the Institute reduced to a vague and sinister backdrop, overseen by equally vague and sinister dudes. “It’s not that he had no characteristics whatsoever,” Chung writes of an executive. “You could say his being exceedingly nondescript was a characteristic.”

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And so The Midnight Timetable becomes a victim of its own architecture. “I hope each story felt like visiting a different lab room in the Institute,” Chung writes in an author’s note. That is both the promise and the curse of this collection. The book is the building; the building is the book.

Rebecca Yarros couldn’t sell her first novel. No publisher would take it. But this week, 14 years later, legions of her devoted readers turned up to more than a thousand midnight-release parties held to celebrate the publication of her latest book.

In the UK alone, more than 180,000 copies of Onyx Storm, the third instalment of Yarros’s blockbuster Empyrean series, sold on day one of publication on Tuesday. Nearly 60 Waterstones branches held late-night parties or opened early on Tuesday morning to mark the occasion. And after some TikTok users posted videos showing that they had managed to buy the book in Asda ahead of its official release, other fans filmed themselves scouring their local branches trying to get their hands on early copies too.

Along with Sarah J Maas, Yarros is at the forefront of the romantasy genre, writing stories that combine elements of fantasy and romance. The first two books of the Empyrean series, Fourth Wing and Iron Flame, follow 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail as she makes her way through dragon-rider training at Basgiath War College. Her enemies-to-lovers romance with Xaden Riorson is central to the story, and in the third instalment, her mission is to save him.

On the eve of publication, fans queued outside Waterstones branches all over the country. “Quite a few people were dressed up as characters from the books which was so fun to see,” said Jennifer, 27, an ocean logistics agent who runs the TikTok account @Jennifersbookcase_ and who attended a launch party in the Liverpool Waterstones.

Once inside, attendees made friendship bracelets, decorated tote bags, and competed in quizzes. There were dragon-themed temporary tattoos and cupcakes, as well as raffles and lucky dips.

“The atmosphere was amazing”, said Dana Holland, a teaching assistant who was inspired to create her TikTok account, @abookishbae, because of Yarros’s books, and who attended a Waterstones launch party in Portsmouth. “We all went for the same purpose, so everyone was really friendly.” Holland has already made plans with people she met at the event.

“The closer it got to midnight, the more buzzed the atmosphere was, as everyone was so eager to receive their book,” said 28-year-old Sarah Walters who runs Sarah’s Book Nook, selling “blind date with a book” boxes, and who attended a launch party at Manchester’s Trafford Centre.

“The extraordinary momentum of the Empyrean series has been nothing short of remarkable, and we are absolutely thrilled by the first-day sales,” said a spokesperson from Yarros’s UK publisher Little, Brown. “Seeing fans come out in large numbers to be the first to get their hands on Onyx Storm at midnight is a testament to the spectacular growth of the series and Rebecca’s fanbase.”

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Why are Yarros’s books such a hit? For Walters, they have an “addictive” element – the fast pacing makes readers “race through”. BookTok – the corner of TikTok where users share book recommendations – has a lot to do with it: Yarros “has a very loyal fanbase on socials”. There are already more than 125,000 TikToks tagged #OnyxStorm.

That the Empyrean series rewards rereading may also contribute to its popularity, says Jennifer, who has read the first two books three times. You “finish each read with a new favourite character or new piece of the world that had gone completely unnoticed in previous readthroughs”. Yarros also “excels at breathing life into side characters”, she says.

Like Yarros and her four sons, Violet has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS). “I can’t speak on behalf of the EDS community, but I think a lot of people feel seen by a main character who suffers from symptoms of EDS,” says Walters. “For that community, it’s been the first time it has been portrayed in a fantasy book, and it’s important that she is still portrayed as a tough and capable character.”

Walters said that there has been “such bad discourse in the media lately” in response to the rise of romantasy. “No one should be shamed for the books they enjoy, and no one should be made to feel less than others for the books they read.”