John Ware's I AM IN ESKEW

I love me some atmospheric audio drama to while away my painsomniac hours, the weirder the better, so after having seen it in my recommendations on my podcatcher (I use Podcast Addict), I subscribed to I am in Eskew. But it took a real live person organically recommending it to me to actually get me to listen in and get hooked almost immediately. 

I Am In Eskew tells the story of two people, David and Riyo, who find themselves in a city straight out of H.P. Lovecraft. Not that it's teeming with fish men or idol worshippers or newly risen from the sea or anything. No, it's constructed on the principles that geometry can be so warped and wrong that it can drive people slowly and subtly mad until their lives -- ordinary enough on the surface, with day jobs and apartments and soul-crushing commutes and dive bars -- basically become an MGMT video. 

And I'm not talking "Electric Feel" or "Time to Pretend," here. I'm talking "When You Die." If you've never watched that video, I've embedded it below, but I'm warning you it is Glorious Super Creepy PKD-Flavored Nightmare Fuel.

Anyway.

We start off with David, who has begun recording sound files detailing his bizarre experiences in this strange city, starting with meeting the architect of an art gallery that was poised to be the New Cool Thing in town until suddenly it wasn't and construction petered out and then halted. It is now the stuff of delicioiusly scary rumor -- so of course the architect invites David to tour the place but warns him to be careful because the building turns out to be the bastard child of the Zone from Stalker/Roadside Picnic and the Navidson house in House of Leaves. It's never quite clear how much danger they're really in, but David seems to believe it's a life or death matter to escape, with or without the architect, and finishes the episode grateful in Eskew's never-ending rain (and I do mean never-ending; it's a signature part of the show's sound design that a steady and misleadingly soothing track of constant rainfall underlies every moment of I Am in Eskew. And, friends, you need the soothing, because while only a handful of episodes begin with content warnings, potentially they all could. Body horror, gaslighting, suicidal ideation (externally imposed), child abandonment, bullying, bureaucratic nightmares, medical horror, it's all waiting for you in Eskew.

David's adventures are largely episodic with little connecting them aside from the setting, and it seems for a while like, in the manner of television of Old, consequences of his actions or what happens to him don't seem to carry over much. Monsters met in one place seem to triumph in terrible ways but are never mentioned again, for instance. And that's fine. Monster of the Week is a tried and true formula, and not everything has to be serialized to the hilt like The Wire.

But then some things do start carrying over. David gets a girlfriend, Allegra,who seems at first to be just another lost soul in Eskew (with one hell of a story of how she got there), but then she seems to be a little too plugged in to how things work, connected to what passes for movers and shakers there (always organizations, never individuals) and things get deliciously unsettling. 

It is under her auspices that my favorite single episode of I am in Eskew comes to pass. She gets David a job at Eskew's Royal Society. His tasks center around condensing long historical narratives into the kind of pithy summaries put on placards describing the background of artifacts in museum displays. Finally, he's going to get some real Intel on this crazy place -- or is he? He soon learns from his unfriendly coworker that in fact their job is to invent the history of Eskew. They are given ledgers with evocative titles that basically serve as fiction writing props: "Rituals of the Argent Basilica," "The Festival of the Weeping Duchess," etc. David and the passive-aggressive Platnik are to come up with flavor text, and if the Royal Society likes what they've written, artifacts to illustrate and prove their made-up narratives appear in the glass display cases, accompanied by exciting exhibit banners and whatnot, in the museum where they work. But nothing is, heh, written in stone. The unseen Society has the last word on how David's and Platnik's words get interpreted -- and their work can be augmented, rewritten, later declared hoaxes. And David and Platnik, delightfully, get competitive and quickly start playing dirty, with very amusing results -- until suddenly, they're not. Because Eskew.

Meanwhile, we slowly get to know the other narrator-figure, a young-sounding British-Somali woman named Riyo, whom David's mother has hired to find whatever became of him because he's been missing since he was a little boy. And realize that we never really did learn for sure how David came to be in Eskew. Riyo's adventures mostly take place in our humdrum world until she finally finds a way into Eskew, and then things really get wild.

The 30-episode series is beautifully narrated by both characters, but a word to those who like to listen to podcasts or audio dramas in bed: the combination of the endless rain sounds and both narrators' almost-too-soothing voices can make it easier than usual to doze -- only to awaken to some seriously disturbing imagery with a few minutes of missing context that one then has to rewind back to get, which can be frustrating. Atmospherically, it's perfect for that time of night, but, caveat auditor, as it were.