Fear Of The Known or Why We Must Not All Ignore "We All Ignore The Pit"

Anyone who's a fan of horror stories and isn't regularly checking out The Magnus Archives is making a big mistake. It's a weekly horror anthology series that eventually turns out to be building to something rather more than it initially appears.

At present, the show stands at 100 episodes, with a remarkably high level of quality control given they've all be written by the same person. Almost every story comes in at or above the level of "good", and occasionally Johnny Sims absolutely smashes one out of the park.

For all that I love the show, though, I've not actually written anything about it. Sims' bite-size tales of unsettling goings on are generally much easier to appreciate than they are to analyse. Episode 97, released a couple of months ago, was very much an exception. That episode, entitled "We All Ignore The Pit", was so fabulously chewy I ended up writing an entire essay about it, which I've reproduced below. Naturally, spoilers abound for the episode in question. There's nothing below that would spoil more than that episode itself, however, so if you want to read the essay to get a sense of the sort of thing the show does, then you can be confident that 99% of the currently available material will remain able to surprise you.

Why is so much horror built upon the fear of the unknown?

I think it was last year that I mentioned to Jonny that The Magnus Archives had taken on a different flavour for me in the post-Brexit, post-Trump world. Terrifying stories always sound different in terrifying times. Jonny responded with bafflement that the real world had conspired to become so awful that his tales of the chilling and macabre had taken on an air of escapism, if only by default.

A fair point. But it’s worth asking ourselves how much of horror functions as escapism even when the world isn’t collapsing. Or, to put it more honestly, it’s worth confronting the fact that much of the world is collapsing, for much of humanity, for much of the time. There are always plenty of reasons to want or need to flee, even into the dark.

Horror as escapism? There’s an obvious way in which this sounds strange. When we talk of an escape to the country, the country we have in mind generally isn’t Dracula’s Transylvania. But the attraction of the horrifying unknown is precisely that – it’s something unknown to us. Something we don’t directly have to face. The attraction of a haunted house lies not just in the shivering thrill of the haunting, but the fact it isn’t our house.

Here’s the thing, though. I have no problem with escapism. Hell, I actively embrace it, whether or not it returns that embrace with blood-drenched tentacles. But we can’t spend all our time escaping. The problem with never being home is you never feel compelled to do the housework. There are some messes that absolutely need cleaning up.

Horror can help here, of course, by delineating the damage, rather than distracting from it. By relying on our waking nightmares, rather than the more traditional form. There’s certainly enough about the hideous ways our squalid world works that we can spin our monsters from.

Let’s talk about one of those stories. Let’s talk about “We All Ignore The Pit”.

First, the fundamental truth: this is a story of two pits, and Ellis has already fallen into the first by the time he arrives in Bucoda, Washington. While there are dozens of fates more unsettling, unpleasant, or simply uncleanable in The Magnus Archives, there aren’t many that are so miserably plausible as having to move across the country for a job that turns out to not exist once you get there. This is the horror of the quotidian – someone left without a salary or a home because of decisions made far above their head. We shouldn’t move on from this, by the way, without noting that two of the possible explanations given for his predicament involve corporate malfeasance, and the third is standard corporate heartlessness. There’s plenty of grotesque monstrousness in this world that isn’t merely not unnatural, it’s not even uncommon. The real horrors aren’t just possible, but legal.

What strikes home hardest isn’t the direness of Ellis’ circumstances, though. It’s how totally invisible his plight is to everyone nearby. His would-be-employers won’t talk to him, and his landlord has no interest whatsoever. He can barely raise any cash to sort himself out even when he tries to sell his own belongings – nobody is interested even in helping him help himself. He’s not just fallen into a pit, but through the cracks in the pavement. No wonder Bucoda has no sidewalks – he’s left the concrete as far below him as he has behind.

It's a powerful metaphor; “They fell through the cracks in the pavement”. It’s always what’s left unspoken here that’s most important. The cracks aren’t supposed to be there. They’re supposed to be fixed by the government, using the money we give them in the form of taxes. Just like with potholes, those younger siblings to the Bucoda pit.

Except they do exist, these cracks and holes. The system isn’t perfect, and everyone knows it. Every now and then, someone trips, or stumbles, or falls and disappears into the gaps.

No system is ever flawless, naturally. The gaps are always waiting. Someone, sooner or later, is inevitably going to fall. It’s always a terrible argument to claim that something which cannot be eliminated should simply be left to grow, obviously. There will always be people who tumble from mountains, but we still throw up warning signs.

We fund mountain rescue, too, or at least we should. A system aware it is imperfect has a moral duty to respond when people find themselves caught on those imperfections.

Other moralities are available. There are two critical and related reasons why it’s so important this story is set in the USA.  First relates to that country’s infrastructure, which in many places can be charitably described as ‘sinking whilst on fire’. Multiple states have roads and bridges in conditions somewhere between extreme disrepair and imminent disassembly. The Governor of Mississippi announced just last month the closing of a hundred structurally unsound bridges. The cracks keep growing, whether literal – an actually collapsed bridge – or metaphorical, like the people who see their livelihood fall out beneath them because their only route into work is no longer safe, and no-one seems motivated to actually do anything about it.

Mississippi tends to offer particularly extreme examples of general American problems – racism, poverty, issues with Tru Blood production. Washington State might be well ahead of the curve on this particular issue. The crisis remains real and ongoing either way. It is also, as it has been for years now, being utterly ignored with those with the power to tackle it. Those with power all ignore the pit.

In the absence of aid from those who are supposed to aid you, what do you do? You keep going. You build around the obstacles you are repeatedly told don’t exist. Your roads skirt the pit that everyone ignores. Sooner or later, you may even start ignoring them yourself. Because how can it make sense that something which so obviously can and should be removed could still be there?

There’s always a reason. In this case, we can blame political expedience, at least as a proximate cause. Republicans won’t work on infrastructure under a Democractic President because it will make him look good, and they won’t do it under a Republican President because they’re busy funneling all the money that could be used to repair bridges into the bank accounts of their billionaire co-conspirators. I guess the costs really add up when you need so many trips to the bathroom to wash all the blood off your hands.

This is only half the story, though. The fundamental question here isn’t why the Republican Party can’t abide by a ceasefire for the sake of the common good. It’s the reasons they’re at war in the first place. I say war; but surely the right word here is “crusade”.  A holy conflict, fought with crazed fervour against the heretics and heathens. The God of America must win out. He must have his sacrifices.

I don’t mean Jesus, obviously. You don’t fire the Congressional Chaplain for mention the need to help the poor if you worship Jesus. The god of political America is capitalism, and the war between its dominant political parties is over how best to serve him. For the Republicans at least, no price is too high if it means defeating his enemies.  Assuming, naturally, that it is being paid by someone else.

Someone like Ellis.

There is a danger in concluding the problem here is capitalism being done badly, however. Capitalism can be done no other way. The system cannot be reformed. The roughest, most jagged edges can be filed down – and it’s certainly to both party’s discredit that neither are inclined to even try if it might crease Elon Musk’s forehead. One might hope the richest country in the world might try to stretch safety nets over the gaps, rather than cheese wire - but those gaps are always there, built in to the very foundations.

The gap Ellis falls into is one within the capitalist system itself.

Let’s take a moment to dig out our social contracts, and check what they actually say. The basic deal, as we’re reminded over and over again, is simple. Work hard enough, and we will earn enough money to live well. Labour eight hours a day (at least), five days a week (at least), for almost fifty weeks of the year (or more), and you’ll be compensated with the cash you need to clothe, feed and house yourself. You might even have enough left over for an X-Box or the occasional holiday – or, if you’re American, the medical treatment you need so you don’t die in agony.

This is a lie so shameless and outrageous and gigantic that it makes many who doubt its truth think the problem lies with themselves. It doesn’t. The system clearly and absolutely doesn’t work. It can’t. Ellis finds this out the hard way. It doesn’t matter how hard you work, if the process that converts that work into (far too little) cash collapses. You can work every hour the god of capitalism demands, but if your job evaporates in front of you, that’s you screwed. You’re going to fall into the cracks.

This is why Ellis alone can see the pit. Not because he’s a newcomer to Bucoda (a real city, originally named after evil spirits before being renamed based on the names of three local investors, in case the link between horror and capitalism wasn’t already clear enough). Because he’s fallen into one pit already, and discovered no-one around could see so much as the outline of where he’s found himself. Even his ostensible saviour (who is ultimately rejected; he just can’t understand) can only process Ellis’ tale as being about poor road conditions. He simply can’t process the idea of a larger problem.

Ellis’ roommate isn’t alone. Nobody wants to know. And really, can we blame them? They’ve been taught and trained their entire lives that the pit cannot exist. How can something which so obviously could and should be removed still be there? Ellis must be mistaken – the world they think they live in simply cannot allow him to be right.  Even when someone does listen to him, like the strange man in the diner, their response is one of contempt. “Stop complaining”. “Concentrate on what you have”. I’ve no idea how deliberate it was, but Jonny’s linking of demanding positive thinking with cosmic evil is one of his greatest flourishes to date.

There are other nods here to capitalism’s failures, such as Ellis realising he’s stuffed his life with pointless junk that now only weighs him down, or the way he now conceives of money as something which can only relieve “the relentless pressure”, and that only temporarily. The cruellest cut comes last, though, as Ellis is exposed to the full existential horror of the daily commute. Hundreds of people pack themselves into a pit they all swear doesn’t exist, and allow a creature they can’t accept is real suck away their lives – quite literally in one case.

Bucoda denies completely the very thing they’re required to let happen. The invisible hand has an almost unbreakable grip. And it would be tempting to suggest Ellis has escaped, that by falling through the cracks he left behind the rat race. Except for that dream. Except for that one night when Ellis imagines himself once again clambering back into the pit and giving it a piece of himself. That’s what we do, isn’t it? That’s what the pit we all say we can’t see demands of us. It doesn’t matter that it suffocates us, buries us; sucks us in and holds us fast. Because what other option do we have?

(There’s an answer to that question, of course, but I don’t think it’s up to The Magnus Archives to explore it.  The Archivist has enough problems on his burned and blistered hands. A workplace injury stemming from a toxic work environment imposed by a cruel employer, naturally.)

Given all this, it seems almost redundant to point out the date attached to this statement makes it clear the entire story takes place within the global financial crash. Bucoda dies in a disaster that’s quite clearly not natural, even though everyone in charge insists that it must be. Because how could anything so catastrophically and globally damaging possibly stem from something lurking in plain sight all along?

The pit is always there. It is always widening. And we are always told, from cradle to grave, that it cannot possibly be there. The only way our system can continue to function is if we all ignore the pit.

The unknown can be a scary place. Dragons lurk at the corners of the map, and monsters breed in every corner but the one we’re looking in. But there exist other ideas, scarier still. “We All Ignore The Pit” is about the horror we know. It’s about the horror we live. And nothing could possibly be more scary than that.

Nothing could be more horrific.