"And Bark, And Grunt, And Roar, And Burn"

(Image from Wakelet)

(Spoilers for up to Episode 100 of The Magnus Archives below).

"'Til The World Falls Down"

(Image from Wakelet)

Right. Now we’re talking. Now, things are kicking off.

(Spoilers for all five seasons of The Magnus Archives below.)

Boxing Clever

(Image from Wakelet)

(Specific spoilers for The Magnus Archives Season 1, and oblique references to the whole show)

"Do Not Open" is a fun episode to take apart, because none of my usual routes actually work. There's no way to do much in the way of character study here; the common observation is that Josh is surprisingly smart is correct, but that's a plot beat rather than a character note. Semiotically, the statement is unusually (and ironically) lacking in depth. This in itself isn't a complaint. Not everything needs subtext, and a twenty-minute horror story can certainly do enough other things for it to not need powerful thematic undertows. I guess you could try and link Joshua's experiences in Amsterdam with his time struggling not to open the box, twisting the whole into some commentary on alcohol/drug recovery.  Importantly, though, that would be tasteless. Even more importanly, it would be shit.

No. Let's just take this one at face value. It's certainly pretty enough. Essentially, and this delights me, "Do Not Open" is a locked-box mystery where the goal is figuring out how not to unlock the box. As I've said, Magnus Arvhives fans talk a lot about how smart Joshua's solution is, but that's just one peak among many. Joshua calmly works his way through figuring out the basics of something entirely inexplicable, and keeps himself alive as a result.

This also means the box's contents aren't revealed to us. Yes, we return to it next season, but this early into the show, where there's no firm evidence there even is an ongoing plot, never mind where it might lead, there's no reason to think we'll ever learn what lies inside the box. This is probably, for me, even smarter of Sims than the solution he cooks up for Joshua to delpoy. The need to open the unopenable box for the audience is Horror 101. No, it's more general than that. It's woven into the most basic levels of storytelling, from poor Pandora onwards. If you set up a box whose contents cannot be released, someone's going to do just that. It's just too obviously a source of entertainment, however bleakly defined. We might call it Chekov's Fun.

But no. While it seems very likely that John opens the box at the end of the statment, he does so leaving Joshua - and hence the audience - with no clear idea of the consequences. the mystery is deliberately prioritised over the satisfying reveal. This is true more generally here, too. Why does the box scratch when he puts orange juice on its lid? Is there something specific about it being liquid, linking it to the mellifluous moaning when it rains? Why does the weather affect the coffin, anyway? What lay within the dreams Joshua no longer remembers?  And over all of this, just why did John pick a Brit in Amsterdam to look after a coffin?

I've heard Sims talk about the difficulty in providing enough answers to play fair with the audience, while avoiding giving them so much the mystery is lost. It's a problem every serialised story which trades in mystery has to grapple with eventually, and Sims stakes out his position quite early here. Even with the entire storyline resolved, much of what I've pointed to above still has no answers. Sure, we know now that torrential rain and the flooding it can cause lies within the remit of The Buried, and that the scratching Joshua heard was probably some poor soul desperately trying to escape. There are still far more questions than answers, though.

For instance: just what actually was going on with John? I've not listened to every Q&A Sims has done, so it's possible he's explicitly ruled this theory out, but I'd always assumed the original plan was for John to be an avatar of the Buried, rather than the Stranger. The way he's described as very short, with a strange aura of density, and the way he refers to himself as being "inside" a foreign land, all point that way. So too does the fact the first victims of the Buried we learn of are both called John. My theory circa Season Three was that both lost Johns eventually became avatars, with one getting killed by his own God for not feeding the coffin, and the other one going on to... well, there's a question. Here's another one: isn't it odd that we never actually meet a contemporary avatar of the Buried, literally the only of the fourteen fears that this is true of?

Maybe this is just an example of early installment weirdness, or external events forcing a change of plans (such as the intended fates of Tim and Sasha). Or maybe it's neither of those things, and I'm just playing around in one of the corners of his world that was always meant to remain dark. My point here, once again, is how well Sims manages to make it difficult to tell what's been shifted around. The Magnus Archives, on top of everything else it is, is one of the most coherent serialised stories I've ever seen, even among single-artist works. Part of that is no doubt careful planning, but it's also about the savviness of keeping so much in shadow, you can rearrange things when people aren't looking.

As a horror story, this episode doesn't hit quite as hard as its predecessor (though that says more about how strong the show was, straight out of the gate). Follow ups are always hard, of course (is that why Joshua references The Lost World, Michael Crichton's first sequel, at least under his own name?). And really, in almost every other way, this is a clear step forward. "Angler Fish" immediately showed that Sims could write an effective horror story. "Do Not Open" proved that he knew why what he was writing was effective.

Fifteen To One

(Image from Wakelet)

So. The first of four essays about the four semi-finalists in the Magnus Cup. For those not in the know (and if this applies to you, you might want to rethink their life choices), The Magnus Archives is effortlessly the best horror podcast I've come across in the last seven or eight years. So good that I spent about nine months in 2019/2020 writing a Twitter thread about an episode every single day. Some of those threads were not short.

When even that wasn't enough (and I wrote up the fifth season too, week by week, as it came out), I'm in the process of using the SCIENCE of polls to SCIENTIFICALLY SCIENCE the best episode of the whole damn shebang - all two hundred episodes of it. Check it out on Twitter: the hashtag is #MagnusCup (not the one about swimming) and it's been going on for FUCKING AGES.

Explanations out of the way, I'm gonna chat about "The Eye Opens", judged by humans who press buttons to be one of the top four episodes of the show. It's also the Season Four finale, so if you've not come across the show before, or even if you just haven't worked through the first 160 episodes yet (and again, I did one a day and wrote about it, so save your excuses), I'd stay clear of what unspools below.

Poetry Hexadecagon

This is ludicrously niche even by my standards, but as part of the general policy round here of trying to keep everything I do in one place, here are sixteen poems I wrote over the last two months, each about an episode of The Magnus Archives. 

(If anyone's reading this who hasn't actually listened to that show, then a) spoilers!, and b) you should get right on that if you're a horror fan.)

Anatomy Class

Hearts want what they want
Even false, spasming, wrong
They want what they want

Family Business

There died a young scion of Von Closen
Whose soul in a tome was then frozen
Until a deal he got done
Brought the page count down one
To ensure he'd no more be arosen

The Eye Opens

Statistics are the numbers of tragedy
A case study: the first day of the end of everything
Number of avatars: 3
Number of fools (hubris): 2
Number of fools (romantic): 1
Number of poor choices: Uncountable
Number of years: 200 (approx.)
Number of fears: 14 (approx.)
Number of victims: 7,000,000,000 (at least)
But the most tragic number?
Number of good cows: Unrecorded

A Guest For Mr Spider

The scratchy hatchy spider spun what Jon would read
John caught a pleb
Who’d fill the spider’s need
Out rang the knocks
And so much for the pleb
And the scratchy hatchy spider knew how to read its web

Bloody Mary

There once died a man who took Keay out
And was bound to the Beholding’s redoubt
Saw no threat in Keay’s bed
Tore the eyes from his head
And the double-blind trial saw him bleed out



Another Twist

The Last

Dear God, people are completely unacceptable
Every one, one too many
Look at this guy!
And that one!
This one has an umbrella! Fucking hell
Go away
GO AWAY
Fuck these seven billion people in particular

Do Not Open

Josh away to get dazed to praise a phase now passed
Nosh and hash, days on the lash, costs that dosh, costs that cash
Takes his bevvies, breaks the levies, and then things get heavy
Mate’s heavy like “dense”, makes no sense, ten grand makes things tense? Steady!
Any levy gets buried until he’s good and gone and ready

So dangles a year, no wrangle, no fear, till “Got I an angle on the Triangle, y‘hear?”
Sod nods, blows his wad, stows all he had for a pad on his tod,
And two mans in a van land to hand off contraband
Bam! Now there’s a coffin, stoppin for nottin, for bare ten grand?
Damn scam’s got heavy; got outta hand by the sand

In deep, there’s scratching and crawling, can’t catch himself falling
Asleep, that’s when the freaks start their calling
“Doubt I’ll make it out of a bout with that lock twice”
Stout lad outfoxed that box with his icebox; nice!
No dice, won’t pay no price, trap best entice new mice

Then John comes a calling, he’s done with the stalling
When’s someone bound underground? There’s one clown down for a mauling
But ground’s bound by no rules, fool, swallows all into its hollow
Choke’s just stoked some bloke gets broke, compressed to coke, do you follow?
So John’s gone, plans gone wrong, and Joshie wonders if he’s won

Our Sims sounds grim on this pick, now it’s out the doubts come thick
Highs and lies in profusion, the conclusion? Prick’s took the mick.
File in the pile styled “Worth Dick”. Recording ends. Click.

Lost John’s Cave





Nothing Beside Remains

I once suffered a man upon my deck
He said – “One day I called my sculpture home
He stood before me, sure he’d hold me in check
Half ruined, half shattered, half husk, all frown
And flame-scorched fist, and sneer set o’er black neck
Telling of a killer, feral and scarred
Yet he survived, stamped by these fearsome things
The hand clenched tight, and the throat set hard
And from dry chapped lips, these words spring free
My name is Jon, the Archivist, all truth I bring
Reveal your Works, ye Mighty, I must SEE!
Nothing beside remains, so cold and dim,
Jon, this colossal wreck; his eyes on me
Yet blind to me, and to where I’ll send him.”



The Panopticon

I watch monsters surge together, thrown
Like waves that meet at jagged stones
And rising from the undertow
A pattern only I could know
Pleasing Jonah Magnus

Once b­­lue, now red in tooth and claw
(So no real change from years before)
A loping hunter guards the fort
This trap in which her mate is caught
Hating Jonah Magnus

The creeping wrong that takes your place
And tears from time what was your face
Is freed from rock to kill again
And so hold ground that I need claimed
Helping Jonah Magnus

Our newest monster, barely born
Alone, yet not, heart whole but torn
With lonely eyes worn like a mask
He sets to Peter’s latest task
Killing Jonah Magnus

When hunters take your face as cue
(As if a mirror wouldn’t do)
It can get awkward ‘for too long
‘Cept these two dickheads went for Jon
Missing Jonah Magnus

Poor Peter really should’ve known
There’re downsides spending life alone
You’ll never catch a gambler’s tell
Or hopeless love, and so he fell
Cursing Jonah Magnus

Now blooms the rose I fed for years
With ninety-three percent of fears
The flower I grew in the dark
Now knows the light, and knows my mark
Seeing Jonah Magnus

Omniscience means I keenly feel
Risk in the villain’s big reveal
But one last trial, and one last brick
Then endless life with one weird trick
Being Jonah Magnus



Checking Out

The Overlook has nothing on
The joys of Hotel Richardson
Don Henley’s vision pales beside
The wonders you’ve in store inside
The corridors that stretch for days
Free you from noise from motorways
The endless rooms where each one leads
Suit of all your convention needs
Just married? Sip on our champagne
And honeyed moon shall never wane
And do not fear you’ll too long stay
Our checkout times all read “N/A”
So join our guests who as one cry
“Walk out that door? We’ll sooner die!”

Monument

Academia isn’t where we keep the smartest people
It’s where we trap those most desperate for validation
And there’s never enough to go around
We demand respect, but we crave attention
Like naughty schoolboys, no tactic too shameful
Half of us riddled with Imposter Syndrome
The other half deliberately stoke it within us
Delighting in how they’ve made bullying into a career
Push back the frontiers of human knowledge?
Mostly you’re pushing against pressure that means to kill you
And even if you do find an idea, sell an idea, deliver on an idea
Half the field will say it was obvious, the other half; obviously wrong
And no-one else, ever, will ever knew you found it at all
The Spiral’s true madness is in thinking me trapped within it
As though insanity pretending to structure is new to me
As though an impossible mansion is harder to navigate than an HR policy
It promises fear, but it offers relief
I have built my life on shifting stone
This new futility finds me well-prepared
And at least I need not compete for grants
Work alone at the impossible, without pay or hope?
That’s what academics call “a holiday”
“Sink or swim” takes new meaning when drowning cannot kill you
But even there, little has changed
Academia always felt like drowning, forever
There’s a calmness with hope drowned too

Grifter’s Bone

Bone! (Bone!)
Let our music set the tone!
This dancefloor’s a battle zone
Your auditory canals
Will always be bleeding

Cos we’re Bone! (Bone!)
Grifting for motives unknown
Can kill live or through headphones
The Slaughter’s deep blood canals
Are never receding!

Bone!



I Guess You Had To Be There

This is a ghost story
I saw a ghost
Who stole our friend in London? The Government!
I saw a ghost
A Spiral’s victim met our gaze
I guess it was on fire?
His statement twisted like a maze
All dogs and roasts and turns and bends
The scratchy hatchy spider webbed shut Brian’s door
I saw a ghost
Whose arms stretch ‘neath rain or sun? The Government
Who’ll choke us with their foul mess? The Government!
Brian felt alone
Spilled his guts on the floor
Now where do I get my money?
And then he said he’d start again!
Whose lies grow best in darkness? The Government!
Dear God, people keep showing up where I am
Every one, one too many
In came Lukas
I’m only here to see Jonah, which is bad enough
Look at this berk!
And made Brian alone
Whining about spiders keeping his friends away
As though that isn’t the dream
And the scratchy hatchy spider knew the score was blown
Fuck this one guy in particular

Tale Of A Field Hospital

At Frere ‘twas typhoid dug his grave
At Spion Kop, gangrene
At Chieveley with the camp plague
The restless man was seen

Dead and deathless Amherst seems
Pursuing his sickening plan
A virus spreads across my dreams
I fear the restless man

A Girl Stays Home Alone At Night

The Night House is one of those films that disappoints not by being less interesting than I'd expected, but by being much more interesting than I'd expected, right up until it completely isn't. It's like expecting you'll get no action tonight and instead getting an aborted blowjob. Sure, you ahead of where you thought you would be pleasure-wise, but come on.

Spoilers below

Contract Fulfilment

Eeek! Not even an hour to go until November and I've not put up a single post for the month mankind knows as "Pre-Halloween"!

This is partially my fault, for not having finished an IDFC post this month until about seven minutes ago. Plus, also, it's entirely my fault because this is my blog. IF YOU WANT TO GET PICKY.

I had planned to show you the Ultramarine Terminators I'd finished painting recently, AKA the best miniatures I've ever done that aren't from a standalone box. But I can't even do that, because I'm trapped for Halloween night in a 14th century mansion, that the owner insisted wasn't haunted even though I'd only asked for a second pot of coffee with my breakfast.

So, join me in an embarassingly obvious exercise in filler with DUN DUN DUUN: One sentence reviews of this year's Halloweenapalooza films. Usually I'm too busy making cocktails and enjoying having friends to really concentrate on the movies I'm playing for the Halloween season. This year though the universe was kind enough to leave me no distraction beyond the cascading tears of loneliness. SO:

Sputnik (2020): This film's biggest weakness is also its greatest strength, in that it manages to be fun and interesting and moderately clever and occasionally unnerving without ever truly engaging with the politics of its USSR setting.

Les Diaboliques (1955): The sort of film that everyone copies afterwards because it's so smart, which means we've seen it all before; though that only matters if you prioritise being surprised over literally every single fucking thing that cinema has to offer.

Vampires Vs The Bronx (2020): Starts from the astonishingly smart conceit of linking vampirism to gentrification, and never lets up on delivering social commentary that's also hilarious.

Geek Syndicate Review: Cromwell Stone

Cromwell Stone is probably a lot easier to admire than enjoy, but there's certainly a LOT to admire.

Geek Syndicate Review: The Walking Dead Vol. 31

I did this here review about them there zombies.

Retrial

Hey everyone, it's Christmas. Have a ghost story.

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‘It will be standing in the corner’, the dead man told her. ‘In the far-right of the room. That’s always where it starts.’

Jia found something persuasive in the dead man’s voice; an urgency that carried through the distance and metal of the phonograph recording. A need to be heard above the whir of the very machine delivering the message.

So she looked.

At first, she could see nothing in the thin light of her budget electric lantern. Books and folders stood stacked and decaying, dying messages from a century previous. Dust danced, but like people who’d rather just be going home to bed.

Jia narrowed her eyes, let her pupils widen. There.

It was standing in the corner.

The figure had its back to her. It stood in the shadow of boxes she’d not yet looked at. That and the weak light saved her from being able to make much out. A thin, grooved body, glistening and concave; an hourglass that demons might use to apportion their torture. A squat, creased head, swaying slowly from side to side as if searching the wall in front of it for an exit.

Or a meal.

‘Crap,’ she whispered.

‘Do not stop playing these recordings,’ the dead man told her. ‘Do NOT stop, or it will notice you.’
There was a click as the wax cylinder containing the message reached the end of its groove. With it no longer turning the number ‘1’ could once again be seen stencilled at one end.

The figure’s head began turning, very slowly, towards her.

Hands shaking, Jia reached for the phonograph, still balanced precariously atop the small table she’d found it on, beside the old furnace in the complex’s sealed basement. Sealed until she’d broken in, anyway, like a cat on its last life still determined to live up to its rep.

Jia removed the played cylinder, replaced it with the next, set the needle.

‘It will still mooove’ the dead man continued, his tinny voice slowing and deepening where time had warped the wax grooves into which he’d poured his words. ‘But this way, you can buuuy time for the others to reeeach you.’

Jia looked again. The figure had left the boxes now, shark-bulk muscle moving silently on insect limbs. Mucus glittered at its edges. It still did not turn to face her, looking instead down a short side passage leading off from the main basement.

‘It iiiiis imperative you make nooo other sound’, the dead man said. ‘We know now how tooo treat these cylinders so to stave off murderous rage from the subject. It will stiiill move, but slowly’.

A click signalled the end of another recording. Jia forced herself not to look at the monstrous figure as she set the next one spinning.

When she glanced hurriedly back, it had shifted once more.

‘The subject will now be approaching,’ the dead man told her. ‘Do not move, and dooo not panic. Avoid looking at its face, as this can cause alarm aaaand in some cases madness.’

Jia didn’t understand. The creature still had its back to her, and had moved away, entering a tunnel that led outside the wan light of her cheap lantern. It took another step away as she watched, a twisting lunge of glittering horror, fast and slow in all the wrong places. It didn’t so much walk as throw itself down a flight of stairs that didn’t actually exist.

‘We have reecorded many reactions to an incoming subject,’ the dead man said. ‘These incluuude goose-bumps, wailing and the gnashing of teeth, garment-rending, ichthyophobia, ichthyophilia, deeemands for compensation or danger money, and diarrhoea, listed iiiiin increasing likelihood of promptiiiing an attack.’

Jia felt frustration and confusion seep into her fear. It didn’t so much dilute it, as freeze along with it, ­bulking out her unrest. Just what the hell had these people been doing down here? How many lives had been lost so some smug prick could use their deaths to record a how-to guide on avoiding immediate murder? And why had this all simply been sealed away, instead of actually dealt with?

The monster was still tumbling away from her, thin and lurching and obviously unbound by the dead man’s narration. Suddenly it froze just outside the lantern’s circle, a darkness silhouetted against deeper darkness.

It was facing the right-hand wall, apparently staring at something there.

‘Survivors are reeequired to complete paperwork detailing any and aall psychological damage following the encounter, and tooo rate the experience out of ten, compared to previous interactions with suuupernatural horrors.’

Jia scooped up her lantern, turned the control that focussed the beam, and, taking great care not to spill light on the creature itself, passed her circle across the musty brick it appeared focussed on.
Her light bounced glinting off a switch, angular and upright.

The machine clicked once more, and the creature’s head again began to slowly swivel toward her.
Jia reached for the final cylinder, thinking desperately. The door behind her was too far away – she’d never reach it before the horror reached her. The door ahead was far closer, but she had no idea where it led, or even whether it was unlocked. Maybe the creature would start moving away again, and give her more time to run? Either way, once the last cylinder ran out she’d have to make her move.

Jia had almost inserted the cylinder when she felt it. Something attached to its end, just next to the number ‘4’. A small blob of wax, with a faint trail leading back to the main cylinder from which it had once dripped, liquid and warm.

Understanding hit like chain-shot, splintering, dragging down. The recordings hadn’t been warped by time. They’d been warped by heat.

Realisation and terror made her clumsy. She got the last cylinder running, but knocked all the others off the table in doing so. Instinctively she reached down to recover them, putting her hand on the phonograph’s table to steady herself.

Immediately the table shifted, creaking as it turned on a hidden axle until it settled with the phonograph facing away from her.

Jia barely even noticed the creature as it threw the switch and ignited the furnace.

It was a rotating table.

She’d been looking in the wrong corner.

The second creature had hold of her before she could move. Jia yelled in surprise and pain, tried to twist herself free. All she accomplished was turning to face what held her. She caught a blur of bone and sucker-mouths, and huge, sightless eyes.

‘Rescue should nooow have been enacted,’ the dead man told her. ‘Otherwise, death is certain.’

‘Screw all three of you’, Jia spat.

She heard a collapsing laugh, like the mockery of a battleship, and then simply darkness.

When Jia awoke, she was burning.

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.

Geek Syndicate Review: The Beast Inside (Demo)

Geek Syndicate got hold of a demo for a horror video game currently up on Kickstarter. I gave it a spin.

House Of Penance Podcast

A bit of a return to an old standard here as I briefly dip back into the deep, silty waters of comic book podcasting. I'm joined this time by James Murphy, he of many strong fingers in many delicious pies, as we talk about House of Penance, my favourite comic of 2016, and an absolute high point in comic book horror.

Geek Syndicate Review: Weird Detective

Two things must ye know about the weird detective...

Geek Syndicate Review: Children of Lovecraft

In which I commend a Cthulhu anthology for finally including more female writers than it does racist piece-of-shit stories.

Geek Syndicate Review: House Of Penance #6

In which I review the final issue of my favourite miniseries in years, not that I read all that many. As so often happens, the ending doesn't quite live up to the rest of the story, but it's still a sold end to an exceptional tale.

Geek Syndicate Review: House of Penance #5

Still pretty much at the top of its, or anyone else's, game. Check my review out.

Geek Syndicate Review: House Of Penance #4

This series is awesome and you should stuff it into your brainbox: part four.

Geek Syndicate Review: House Of Penance #3

Not the most fun time to be in the UK, is it? Still, take your minds of it by reading about an unravelling fictional nightmare.

Geek Syndicate Review: House Of Penance #2

I took some time away from chronicling the new Game of Thrones season with a review of Tomasi and Betram's House of Penance #2. It's a title that is shaping up very nicely indeed. Check it out.