Just listened through The Magnus Archive horror podcast

[breakinglight11]

I recently finished the back catalogue of an audio drama podcast, The Magnus Archive. It's a horror show where a research institute catalogues a complicated cosmology of terrors through recording encounters people have had with them, while unraveling the terrors true designs. Practically that means it has an uber plot built around the telling of many short horror stories in the form of statements of people's encounters. Matt Kamm recommended it to Bernie, who in turn suggested it to me, and he and I have been listening through it for the last several months.

Overall I like it very much. It's genuinely creepy, with a very well-thought-out world hosting a fairly unique cosmic horror, doled out engagingly both as standalone scary stories, and as pieces of a larger whole. The production design is solid, and the acting ranges from workmanlike to good. I'm actually really impressed at how well-planned it is. The creators clearly thought everything through very carefully in advance, and they do an amazing job of giving you the creeps for each individual encounter story while also building a much larger, more complicated meta plot out of those pieces. This aspect of the writing is excellent, and my favorite part of the show.

I like these parts of it enough-- the world, the plot, and the creepiness --enough to excuse the fact that honestly I don't think the characters are very engaging. The structure of the show does not give you very much information about anyone, and it's not in my opinion great about teaching you who they are incidentally through action or conversation. So everybody seems to me to be a bit generic and thin. The acting, as I said, is fine across the board trending to good; the main character's actor in particular, who is also the writer, also gets stronger and stronger as the show goes on. But nobody's really so strong as to do a ton to flesh out what's written in the dialogue alone. Mostly everyone serves the main thrust of the plot function. And the relationships are... weird. I think we're supposed to think they're all Fire-Forged Friends, as TV Tropes would put it, people who initially don't like one another but their shared struggles bring them close. Instead they just seem to be contentious with each other basically all the time, without much affection to leaven it. The one exception for me is the Martin character, who also has the benefit of the most nuanced acting performance.

I'd expect all this to bother me more than it does. Usually not being very invested in the characters is a deal breaker for me. But the rest of it really is strong and engaging enough to make up for it for me. I wanted to know what happened, I enjoyed the conception of the horror of the world, and I found it genuinely creepy, without ever feeling actually disturbed. So I'm really glad I listened through it, and grateful to Matt for recommending it. I wonder if there's something I can learn from it to help with my idea for my Victorian ghost story audio drama.