Book Review: "Mister Magic" by Kiersten White

“And Val. A little girl who doesn’t understand why the world is the way it is, why everyone tries to tell her she can’t want or feel the things she does. Why her mother never sees what she needs, only hates her for asking. Why, when she reaches out a hand and demands, she’s met with pain and rejection. Here, when she reaches out and demands? Magic. And at such a small cost.”

Honestly, I have been putting off reading this book for a few weeks as I have been engrossed in folk horror anthologies. But nothing interests me more than new age horror that relies on folk or urban legend elements. For example, in this novel we have a TV show that aired until 1991 that has no online presence and has its online presence actually deliberately wiped from the internet. Places like Reddit speak about the existence of the show, but YouTube are forbidden from airing it and podcasts are wiped for just talking about it. The show was called Mister Magic.

Mister Magic featured six children in the 'circle of friends' who would be on a blacked out set. The set would then come alive with their imaginations and yet, there are pieces missing. There was an accident in 1991 that got the show taken off the air. Thirty or so years' later, the five remaining circle of friends members reunite to talk about their experiences of the show for a podcast which hopes not to be wiped out of existence. Valentine is just one of those people who was never planning on coming in the first place as she does not remember a single thing about being on the show. As she progresses into the house in which apparently her parents lived during the filming of the show, she hears phrases like 'fire' and 'sister' thrown around. Forbidden from asking more questions, she must seek out her own answers as other members of the circle of friends get entangled in the loop.

Jenny seems to hold all of the information. In a house in the Utah desert where parents of the children in the circle of friends once lived, the reunion takes place and Jenny lets the other four remaining members in. She does not play by the rules, doing things like uttering the name of Mister Magic - an entity that nobody has ever actually seen the face of and nobody knows whether he is a real human being, a puppet, or an early version of CGI. Jenny though, is a mothering soul now remembering almost everything that the others do not - especially Val. However, keen not to fill in the gaps just yet, she hands everyone a list of things that they must do in the reunion including attending a gala in the resident town of someone Val thought all this time to be dead.

Val must deduce whether this is the right thing to do, whether she should trust people she knows but doesn't remember and whether she is being led down memory lane or lured into a trap. As things grow dark and fires become more vivid, it's time to learn about what really happened on the set of the forbidden children's show Mister Magic.

The writing style is actually really interesting; littered with conversations on social media, reddit posts and even a redacted and incomplete Wikipedia page, this book urges readers to legitimise the urban legend about the show back into existence. Thus, making this experience all the more frightening and real.

The characters are really well written too, I feel like I knew them all, past and present, based on the way they behaved and what they said. For example: the comment about Val never listening to Jenny when they were younger to the point where Val is actually listening to Jenny when they are older makes the distance between past and present seem a lot longer than it actually is and thus, makes Mister Magic seem further away.

This is clearly one of the best books I have read this year and it is going to be pretty hard to top everything I have learnt about the doomed children's show Mister Magic for most other novels now. I am obsessed with this book.