Mister Magic — Dinaburg Writes

by Kiersten White

I think all elder millennials walk through life haunted by lost media that cling to our experiences and conspire to make things weird. My eyes are regularly beset by the partially animated (or pre-digitally edited?) children falling into a stamp, which is not spooky or unsettling in the least while also clearly remaining relevant to my day-to-day existence. If you were not fated to catch the Canadian made-for-TV movie Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveller, or perhaps not lucky enough to misremember most of by way of commingling it with the book Half Magic, well, let’s just say it mostly gives “trapped in a stamp but not actually happy to be there.” At least, to me.

Well, actually-actually what often draws unbidden from my child-mind is the superposition of the little kid from Star Wars: Caravan of Courage looking aghast at an unremovable electronic bracelet with a glowing red LED display that represented his health/survival. But since that was unearthed from a personal, actual nighttime nightmare I had when I was little and isn’t indexable media that ever existed, it shouldn’t count for this purpose.

Though if a composite image from my dream was on wikipedia, I would certainly be spooked the heck out.

I have more videogames in my head than films or TV shows: something from the SEGA Genesis that I rented and can vaguely picture, where one commands little armies. But even after scouring lists of all Genesis games ever published, nothing really matches what the mists of time have obscured.

This is my best guess, but still doesn’t seem right

Being unable to confirm whether this mystery rental really happened slightly informs how appealing the premise of Mister Magic is. How wild would would it be to not confirm that you actually watched a thing, even after other message board posters say they remember it, too? The unease derived from unstable social archeology is what I came to Mister Magic for: spooky is not my usual genre, but this premise really gripped me. Unsettling, I like. Perhaps I can even go as far as confusing, opaque, or labyrinthine. The idea of a lost TV show that people remember and no one can find is cool; making it haunted is fine, though not to my taste.

Sometimes Mister Magic delivers. Between chapters there are “excerpts” of message boards or emails or other “found writings” which I truly enjoyed. Personal taste is what it is, but I would have enthusiastically devoured a whole novel of fragments and in-world conjecture (see above: opaque, confusing, labyrinthine) rather than a standard adventure set in a cool premise.

The book had a specific and—the acknowledgements section makes clear—very personal story to tell. Which is, again, fine. It runs a little bland after a while, though, because what is going on and how it is likely to resolve becomes very clear very quickly. And then it we’re left waiting for characters to catch up to the action:

Val doesn’t move. She doesn’t blink. She doesn’t breathe. It’s a trick of the light. It has to be. There was nothing on the floor. She would have noticed, she would have seen it.
Val pulls her feet slowly upward, away from the carpet, from the cape, from whatever is under it. If she can get the blanket over herself, she can shut the door on this horror, she can pretend—
The cape scuttles forward.
Val screams so hard it wakes her up. She’s covered in sweat, still under the blankets.

I don’t normally get tricked by dream sequences (unless it involves bracelets and caravans and Star Wars and I dream them, I suppose) but this one got me. It was thrilling to have something spook me out and then be banished into “nope, that wasn’t real” zone, so that it could be truly spooky in the moment but not need to be addressed or resolved “realistically” in the larger plot. Sure, this could feel cheap if done often or poorly, but because Mister Magic posited this cross-reality creeper creature as a spooky possibility, it worked.

The effort involved in keeping the main narrative aloft and cleanly resolvable often felt, to me, like a burden: things didn’t get to get too weird and they kept lurching back toward a passive status quo, each little step toward the unsettling forgotten or undone to make the next lurch toward the conclusion possible. Val had no real ties to the world so when things ended with her whisked off into the magical aether, it’s not like I was sad for the people she left behind. She had no stakes in reality, nothing to lose. Making sure it was palatable for her to disappear felt like a the bulk of her character development.

I think Mister Magic is a fine story, but I liked hearing the concept and considering what it might be more than I actually enjoyed reading it. This is how I imagine it would feel to watch Caravan of Courage or play Warriors of the Eternal Sun now; some things are better left as that unscratchablee itch in the back of your mind.