There is a terrible price to be paid if you happen to be a human trapped in a horror story. Christopher, the narrator and protagonist of Christopher Zeischegg’s The Magician, spends most of the novel dealing with the effects of both a spiritual mugging and a spectacularly horrendous rape. His rough and sporadic recovery – told in physically, psychologically, and spiritually-excruciating detail – comprises the meat of the tale, as he tries to understand his life while dealing with extraordinary discomfort amid a family sent into freefall. And here Zeischegg is at his best, sustaining tension via painful interactions, some awkward, some emotional, some both, but always seamlessly believable, as people subject to the hazards found within most any spooky story would probably need a lot of time to recover and commiserate from anything that doesn’t flat out kill or maim them. Zeischegg thus successfully embeds the otherworldly within the subtleties of plausible relationships between the narrator, his mother, and his mother’s husband (as he is relentlessly referenced); a classic Freudian love triangle that generates gravitational fields which, in turn, plausibly bends the action and pumps up the pathos.
The narration is so palpably rich and naturalistic that one may playfully wonder if it’s fiction at all – even during its most creepy bits. Mark Twain once counseled: “Write what you know.” In The Magician, the narrator, named Christopher, is, like the author himself, someone who’d worked in porn and lives in California, and whom, perhaps also like the author, unintentionally gets drawn into some seriously spooky shit.
While these characters inhabit lives that are relatable and mundane, they yearn for the sublime. Christopher’s mother and his mother’s husband are practicing Christians. How they deal with an adult son who endures the aftermath of rough run-ins with evil spirits I will leave Zeischegg to relate to you if you take up the tome. One of the broader and more intriguing aspects of the book is, in fact, the ways in which Christianity provides a subtle and unresolved frame to the action. After all, if the Devil or other demons are somehow real, then why not attribute a certain efficacy to their correlative spiritual entities?
The Magician was initially published in 2020, during the enforced twilight of the pandemic
lockdown, and became a creeping success. It has now re-released posthumously, by Apocalypse Party Press, as a literary zombie to be tracked down and devoured with your hungriest eyes.
