One of life’s greatest pleasures is gambling your money on a writer you’ve never read and having it pay off. Browsing one of my favorite local bookstores, I was drawn to Mister Magic by Kiersten White by the bold, pink cover. Central to the cover is a TV showing a test pattern with a liquid black substance, like blood but not, running down from it. You’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover; but this cover was badass.
I was drawn to the summary of the story because it’s such a fresh idea. I don’t think I’ve read or even heard of another horror story that centered around a TV show. As something so ubiquitous in our lives, once I thought about it, it seemed like a huge gap in the genre. So I placed my wager and away I went.
I can definitely recommend this story. If you want more details, continue reading for my review. But be warned…
Val has been in hiding her entire life, rescued or kidnapped by her dad, she’s not entirely sure. Having accepted it long ago, she’s grown up on a horse farm and riding camp in Idaho. Now an adult, she has to confront what comes next when her dad dies. She’s ready to do just that when, at her dad’s funeral, three men show up who recognize her, who came just to find her, because she and they, along with one other woman and Val’s presumed dead sister, were known as the Circle of Friends as children on the TV show Mister Magic.
The prologue (?) grabbed me immediately. Addressed directly to the reader in second person, it reminisces about the titular TV show Mister Magic. But it does so with one of the best opening lines to a novel I’ve read in a while:
“Your favorite childhood television program feels like a fever dream.”
The story immediately sets up Mister Magic as something that evokes positive feelings of nostalgia but also feels dangerous.
The prologue also sets up the character of Mister Magic as the absent center of the story. While studying Dracula in college, most of the classroom discussion revolved around the concept of the absent center, the character or event that, while not often (or ever) present in the narrative, nonetheless shapes the story around them or it. Though eventually Dracula rejoins the story, for most of its middle, he’s affecting the characters and narrative from offpage.
As the absent center, Mister Magic serves as a kind of macguffin. As the characters come together and try to piece together a cogent and logical narrative of the show and how it ended and, most importantly, why Val can’t remember anything, why Val’s dad took her away, and what happened to Kitty, Val’s sister, they determine to find their answers through a supposed podcast about the show. Each step they take toward solving any of these mysteries seems to lead them further down a rabbit hole and into darkness.
That’s what worked for me about this story. The story focuses on Val, but as a story about religious trauma, each of the four other Friends gets great character development for the ways that they’ve survived and coped. The story has such a wide scope from Val as the main character, to her four supporting characters, but also by side characters. There are big, splashy reveals, but also details that White leaves up to the reader to put together. My favorite is the realization of why Jenny’s mom attacks Val at the gala. It’s never blatantly stated; it’s a dot that’s connected later in the story. That kind of pacing and story and character development are what make this a great story.
There is one thing that didn’t work for me, a loose end. Maybe it will be something that I understand better if I ever reread the novel. At about the two thirds point of the story, after Val left the horse farm in the third chapter (confusingly titled “Buckle My Shoe”), Val finds out that Gloria, the woman who owns and runs the farm, who took Val and her dad in when Val was a child, has been trying to get in touch with Val, frantically warning her not to trust anyone. It’s supposed to make Val (and the reader) question the validity of the facts of the narrative so far. But for me, it only serves as a temporary distraction and red herring.
There’s so many stories out there to read, I honestly can’t remember the last time I reread anything. But I think that, in a year or two, I’m going to come back and reread this one. There’s the argument that you can’t enjoy books like Mister Magic or movies like The Usual Suspects once you know the whole story and all the twists. But I think that you can enjoy them in a new way, by understanding the depth and nuance behind each line.
