Mister Magic (2023) is a variant on the “cursed film” genre I’m drawn to, the cursed kids’ TV show. Thirty years ago, Mister Magic, the longest-running TV show in history (it began on radio, then transitioned to TV) ended in mysterious circumstances. Now, the kids who made up the final cast are invited back to the remote desert location in Utah where it was filmed, to be interviewed for a podcast. Of the six kids, only four have been found until Isaac (one of the cast, now grown up and working as a private investigator) tracks down Val, who has remained completely hidden until now. Unfortunately — or fortunately — they find her on the day of her dad’s funeral, her dad being the one who took her off the show and kept her hidden ever since. Val, meanwhile, has no memory of Mister Magic at all, knowing only that she has had to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice, should some unidentified someone track them down. Suddenly learning her mother is not only alive but living near the reunion location (in the town of Bliss), Val decides to go along, to find out what happened to her and the show that she’s wiped from her own memory…

Along the way we start to learn more about Mister Magic. The show was about six children playing in a world that made their imaginings real. One of the cast, Marcus, would “paint” scenery, and the kids would interact with it. For additional help, and to extract themselves from the scrapes they’d got into, they could form a circle and summon the black-cloaked Mister Magic. (Nobody can remember if he was played by an actor in a costume, was a puppet, or a special effect. To the kids in the show, he was real.) Towards the end, though, Val — who, it turns out, was the leader in the group — tried to get them to rely on Mister Magic less and less. What had she learned about their supposed benefactor?

The novel is peppered with nicely-done little extracts from the internet — a Wikipedia page, a chat forum, social media posts, and so on — of people trying to recall the show, which they evidently feel nostalgic about. But no video, stills, or documentary evidence exist, and the occasional article that pops up with genuine information always disappears. A key thing about the show everyone remembers, though, is the little songs the cast were constantly singing, all of which were trite little morals, like:

When we care about others
We share what we’ve got
But if you don’t work for it
Nothing is your lot

The novel does a good job of building an air of mystery and nostalgia about the show, and of increasing darkness, even supernatural evil, about it, too — at first, anyway. The house where the reunion is to be held (and where the cast used to stay while it was being filmed), gets its Hill House moment:

“Val wonders if all houses have deep roots, whole sections of their bodies hidden beneath the ground. But this house, this inexplicable house, refused to stay buried and is rearing to its full height, ready to strike.”

But ultimately, I think the novel spent too much time on this “air of mystery” stage. Not so much with regards to the show itself and how the kids left it, but the questions that arose once I knew all that. For instance, the supernatural element. There’s two things you can do with the supernatural, once you’ve spent time setting it up as mysterious and scary. One is to let it remain unexplained, the other is to describe something of its nature, and thereby give it more of a specific meaning. Here, the supernatural has to be explained in some way, because it’s wrapped up in a children’s TV programme, and that’s not the sort of thing the vast and unknowable cosmic entities of, say, a Lovecraftian horror would be found doing. The trouble is, because White hasn’t dropped any hints about the nature of her particular supernatural thing, we get a situation I don’t think works well (I also wrote about it in my look at John Gordon’s The Waterfall Box), where a character has to suddenly intuit all the information they need about this thing right near the end, mostly in one go. Which, unless you’re really wrapped up in the story, just feels like a writer telling rather than showing, in a situation which really benefits from showing rather than telling.

Another element that was unexplained, for me, was the operation behind the TV show. As a mild spoiler, this proved to be a cult-like group, a split-off from the Mormons. At this point, I’d already taken a quick glance at the author’s note at the end of the book, where she says “Yes, I was a Mormon. No, I am not anymore.” The story obviously has a lot of personal meaning for her, but I think perhaps this led to her fictional cult being underdeveloped. Just what were their beliefs? Why were they doing what they were doing? How did they justify it to themselves? Did they have larger, world-threatening plans? Were they using the supernatural thing, or was it using them? And how was that power-balance likely to go? A lot of questions were left unsatisfactorily even unhinted at. (This sort of thing leaves me with the sinking feeling the author might have decided to put it all in a sequel, which I’ll never read.)

There’s a certain similarity to Stephen King’s IT, with its grown-ups returning to put an end to an evil they’d faced as kids, but IT, through its very lack of any specificity, managed to make itself into a universal tale about childhood fears. Here, we’re dealing with something more specific, though still widespread — the coercive need to make children behave — but the story fails to hit that archetypal note that would really make it feel universal.

Gaskell’s continuation of her prehistorical fantasy saga, Atlan (1965) — either the second or the third volume, depending whether you’re reading it back then in hardback or now in paperback — was not only published simultaneously with another of her novels, a “witty look at modern Fleet Street” The Fabulous Heroine, but written simultaneously with it, too. According to an interview she gave to The Daily Mail (3 September 1965), “When I was feeling emotional I worked on ‘Atlan’. When I was in a calmer mood I got on with my other novel.”

It opens a year after the end of the previous book. Cija, now Empress of Atlan beside her husband Zerd, is pregnant. The trouble is, relations between herself and Zerd being what they are, the baby can’t be his, but her half-brother Smahil’s. As soon as she realises, she finds a way to hasten the baby’s entry into the world, so Zerd will think it’s his. Meanwhile, armies from the Northern and Southern kingdoms are seeking to enter Atlan to topple Zerd and take over for themselves. To make matters worse, the army of the Northern Kingdom is headed by Zerd’s first wife, Princess Sedili, and the army of the Southern Kingdom is headed by the father of Zerd’s second wife, Lara, who’s also along for the ride. The political situation, then, is indistinguishable from the rivalries of three women for Zerd, or at least for the throne at his side.

To keep Cija and his putative heir, Nal (who plainly looks nothing like him — Zerd, after all, has blue scales), safe, Zerd decides to send them to a remote castle. On the way, they’re attacked by the huge Yulven (wolves) of Atlan, who slaughter all but Cija and her son. Cija finds refuge in a nearby inn, where she’s forced to work as “a scullion, a scrubber and a dweller in grime and grease and backstairs slime”, at least until the winter ends. Thus begins the first of many reversals of fortune for our narrator-heroine.

The reversal is Gaskell’s main plot device. Sometimes, perhaps, reversal isn’t the word, as Cija might be rescued from one peril only to find her rescuers another sort of peril entirely. Every so often she finds herself restored to being an Empress, whereupon she becomes completely bored. But, not to worry, she’s going to find herself thrown into peril again: there’s a mad scientist hiding in the castle walls, or a disreputable member of her retinue shoves her and her children into a boat and pushes her out in a rough sea, or she wanders lost through an empty land foraging for food only to be picked up by her main rival, Princess Sedili. Like a fantasy version of The Perils of Pauline, the turns of this bottom-weighted Wheel of Fortune continue almost all the way to the end, where she finds herself crawling into the slimy lair of a swamp serpent in search of her daughter (she has, by now, acquired a second child, this time definitely Zerd’s). In a rare moment of self-awareness, Cija at one point reflects: “My own pattern appears clear to fate. The tower and the flight and then the tower again.”

But this isn’t a complaint. In fact, the best thing about reading Atlan and its predecessors The Serpent and The Dragon is how utterly mad they are. On the surface, Cija herself appears quite reasonable, almost ordinary, but the world around her is crazy-full of bandits, warriors, “robbers, rapists, killers, perverts and just plain brutes”, schemes, plots, wars, catastrophes, dangerous creatures, and innumerable other perils. Even in the relatively stable islands of non-adventure between these eruptions of plot-insanity, Gaskell can create some interesting and original settings. The inn where Cija is forced to scullion early in the book transcends the cliché of the fantasy inn by being convincing in its own shabby way. It’s a big establishment, with rivalries between the servants in the various wings; it’s presided over by a completely cynical and bullying old woman, who takes a particular dislike to Cija, forcing her to sleep Harry Potter style in a cupboard under the stairs; and each winter’s end, it’s regularly raided by cattle-thieves, who break in, steal, and cause havoc, in the face of which the staff are so helpless that they eventually give in and just treat the whole thing as a particularly out-of-hand party.

The main negative for me is Cija herself. As she’s the narrator, we see all this madness through her eyes, and she has a powerful dulling effect on the whole thing. As a character, she’s rather shallow, self-involved, a bit spoiled and somewhat insipid. (No negative trait in a literary character is a real negative if it’s carried out with brio, but Cija is just a little too lifeless for that.) At one point she says:

“I’ve a right to a life of my own, doing something I want to do. Not just playing a forgotten wife, a wife-in-waiting, a forsaken Queen all palely loitering — till I am pulled into the pit of the maelstrom just because I married someone famous…”

But there are points in the narrative where she’s got plenty of opportunity to do whatever she wants to do — when she’s Empress of her own little castle, for instance — but she does nothing except get bored. She has no aim, and no real interest in life. She needs all the peril just to perk up a bit. Her overall tone, to me, felt like she was constantly running her finger over the surface of things, then looking disgusted at the grime she’d picked up. She does a lot of complaining. Even when she and her children are in peril of their life, she’ll never fail to point out how her clothes are getting dirty, or she’s being forced to walk through cold puddles.

Even more than in The Serpent, there’s something non-connective about her. She just doesn’t like anyone. “I am all alone,” she says, “even if there are people and animals alone with me, all alone just as I always was.” But she’s never alone in this book. She just doesn’t connect with the people she’s with. Even her children. Of her son Nal, for instance, she says “Do I love him? No, he makes my flesh creep.” And Zerd, who for a brief moment she decides she really does love, only for that to fade a few pages later, she calls “the man I suppose I certainly seem to love”. The Lady doth equivocate too much. (She’s even not too keen on herself. She decides she is, to the men in her life, “Too much trouble, no returns.”)

She dislikes places, too. Of the castle which is her home, she comes to feel that “The inn with all its squalor and degradation seemed nearer to my bones than this great shell in which I wander aimlessly.” And, finally, she dislikes Atlan itself:

“I spent a lifetime yearning for Atlan, the great good stronghold, the lost purity, before ever I heard its name. I curse the day I first set foot on it… and I hope never to see Atlan again.”

But Atlan itself has secrets still to be explored. The thing that kept me going through this novel — when Cija’s insipidity as a narrator blinded me to the utter madness of the plot — were the hints of “Ancient Atlan”, the land-within-the-land that Cija glimpsed on her first arrival there: a mystical place of faerie-like beings and strange powers, something closer to the world of her first novel, Strange Evil, perhaps. The Yulven who spare her life, and who seem to have a particular reverence for her son (who, being born of Cija and Smahil, both of whom are descended from alien gods, has “the wild blood, the gods’ blood, the darkness-divinity”), the mysterious pipe-player who pops up to enchant people with his weird playing, the grumpy old women who have witchy powers: all of these pointed towards a journey into that far more magical realm. But that journey isn’t made in this book. I can only hope it is in one of the following two volumes.

My favourite contemporary review for Atlan is a short one (The Aberdeen Press and Journal, 14 Aug 1965):

“Jules Verne could have written this novel but he would have kept it clean.”

Though, “Jules Verne” is probably named as he’s the only imaginative writer the reviewer knew, because Atlan is hardly Jules Verne material, and that hint the novel is somewhat racy is overselling things a bit. Perhaps it was for mid-60s Britain, but it’s nowhere near as salacious as, say Robert E Howard could be. But that brief review does at least hint at how frankly unhinged this book can be — and how much more so it must have seemed at the time (in the UK, anyway), which was on the cusp of the 60s social revolutions that would soon turn the real world on its head.

Published in 1998, John Gordon’s The Flesh Eater is a couple of decades on from the heyday of 70s and 80s folk-fantasy YA I’ve been reviewing on this blog, but in terms of feel, it absolutely belongs. (Although it’s more horror than fantasy.)

Set in Gordon’s beloved East Anglian fens, the protagonist Harry Hogge is in his late teens (old enough to be driving, young enough that his parents aren’t on at him to get a job — a very narrow margin), son of the proprietors of the town’s largest hotel, the Pheasant and Trumpet. His girlfriend is Miranda Merchant — beautiful, yet with a hint of the mercenary about her — but another girl stumbles into his life, the somewhat clumsy and anxious Emma Judd “with the wild black hair and the skirt with a lopsided hem”.

Researching local history, Emma has become obsessed with the legend of the “Mary-Lou”, a monster said to tear people apart and gnaw their bones. Her Great Aunt Rose has an even more vivid take on it:

“That’s what the Mary-Lou always done to them. Skewered them up somewhere like a butcher, so as he could come back and get them when he wanted a bite o’ fresh meat!”

Emma has discovered that the tale of the “Mary-Lou” originates with the first constable of the local castle, Guy de Marais, who kept a particularly vicious torturer as a servant, and it’s this servant who became known as the Mary-Lou — the marais loup, or Marsh Wolf. But, unknown to her or anyone else, the current occupant of Barbican House — built over the ruins of the old castle — one Guy March, a direct descendent of Guy de Marais, is intent on finding the burial place of the Mary-Lou, and continuing his forebear’s “necromantic practices”.

I first became aware of Gordon thanks to a Ghosts and Scholars article on him, which focused more on his earlier book, The House on the Brink. (Come to think of it, that would have been before The Flesh Eater was published, anyway.) The Flesh Eater certainly fits the Jamesian mould, with its unearthing of an ancient undead evil, also bringing in an element of “Casting the Runes” in the way the Mary-Lou is guided to its next victim.

But like all of the John Gordon books I’ve read so far, The Flesh Eater gives equal time to teenage relationships as it does to the supernatural. As I said in my review of The Waterfall Box, there’s a four-way tangle that appears in a lot of Gordon’s fiction, with the protagonist being drawn to two girls (one beautiful and sexually sophisticated but ultimately self-centred, the other less showy and more genuine), with a rival male (usually more physical) waiting to step in. That situation seemed to be emerging at the start of The Flesh Eater, with the athletic Donovan Brett (Miranda’s former boyfriend) an unwelcome presence in Harry and Miranda’s relationship. But just as I was expecting teen tensions to really ramp up, Donovan becomes the first victim of the resurrected Mary-Lou. And the looming confrontation with Miranda over Harry’s involvement with Emma is another thing that disappears almost too quickly. It’s as if Gordon has, at some level, dealt with this tangle and no longer needs to really gnaw at it as he did in his earlier fiction.

One thing it does mean is that the balance between the teen tangles and the supernatural investigation is much better — pretty much perfect, in fact — than in, say, The Waterfall Box, which had to cram in too much of the supernatural element in the final chapter to be really satisfying. Here, the relationships are handled much more as background to Harry and Emma’s investigations into the Mary-Lou, but tick along nicely.

There are a few other character moments that point to areas the novel could have explored — the difficulty Harry has in admitting he doesn’t believe in God, for instance — but it’s a short book, that just hints at some themes, rather than investigating them fully. (Harry’s public admission of atheism is there largely to bring out his mother’s snobbishness, anyway.)

One — perhaps the most interesting, as it combines the love story with the supernatural — is that Harry and Emma have occasional telepathic flashes where they realise they’re hearing one another’s thoughts. This is set against Guy March’s telepathic connection with a woman we don’t meet until the end, a woman who keeps indoors and “sees” the world through her pack of cards, but (mentally) accompanies March everywhere he goes. Harry immediately knows that the telepathic moments he shares with Emma are down to their relationship being grounded in genuine love, but what does this say about Guy March and his woman, whose identity, we learn at the end, points to a perhaps unhealthy kind of connection?

The Flesh Eater is, I think, a much more successful take on the same sort of story as The Waterfall Box, and it certainly makes me want to read (or re-read, in a couple of cases) some more of Gordon. Amazingly, for instance, he had another book published the same year, The Midwinter Clock. But then, I’ve got his boy-and-girl-go-into-a-fantasy-world novel The Edge of the World on my shelf, just begging for a re-read…