Eskew by Episode: Cruelty, Border, Ingratitude

In which we offer commentary, anecdotes & random thoughts on every episode of I Am In Eskew.

Follow along with us as we go!

Episode 20: Cruelty

Back with Allegra, and safe - for now - David takes on some temporary work, and returns to school.

This was a script that really stung me emotionally, and I’m thrilled that it’s one that seems to have stuck with people years afterwards.

We did get one listener after it was released, complaining that it was immersion-breaking; that we shouldn’t have included a content warning at the start of this particular episode when we hadn’t interrupted any of the others, and that by this point listeners should know what they’re in for.

But the pain and the sense of being hounded by those around you is pretty much just text in this one, not subtext or metaphor, and the source of the horror feels a lot more grounded than in other episodes (no matter how surreal it gets), so I’m glad we included a bit of a warning to folks.

"There’s a friend who’s a trustee at the old Preparatory School in the Jeweller’s Quarter."

I think this episode actually began as a standalone idea for a horror story (one which I’d love to come back to in some capacity!) where we’re imagining the UK private school system - or as it’s ridiculously known, the ‘public’ school system - as a crucible, a creation phase for a particular sort of social network and a particular kind of exclusive cruelty in the acting-out of power over the powerless.

It’s pretty timely, because we had a news story last week coming out of Eton, the UK’s most famous private school, which is solely responsible for 20/56 of our Prime Ministers to date - where state school students visited during the speech of a right-wing politician, and were booed and had slurs yelled at them.

The use of the term ‘preparatory school’, which is completely inaccurate here (in the UK, prep school students would be younger than 13), is meant to be deliberate - the students at Magda’s school are being prepared, they’re being transformed into something, as is she.

"But there’s no end to these roots."

I like the roots that spring up around the grounds of the School quite a lot, as a passive horror image. There’s no threat to David here, he’s not in any danger - there’s just these warped black roots, emblematic of the cruelty of the school, the trauma experienced by its victims (and as implied, David himself) that keep growing back no matter how hard and how long he digs.

And Magda herself, of course, keeps growing back like a flower.

"The extravagant spectacle will encourage the wealthy parents of the children who come here to make donations that will enable further extravagant spectacles for years to come."

As someone who did go to a posh school and still gets fundraising emails from them to this day, begging for help building expensive new prestige facilities to further the institution - the audacity is real, and it is breathtaking.

"'Can you believe what she did?' they ask each other."

Something that really sticks with me - with an immense amount of guilt - is, in what I saw growing up, the disparity between how fiction tells us we should respond to bullying to end it  all at once (one cathartic act of violence by the victim that effectively silences their oppressors - they yell back with a cutting remark, or they hit their bullies in the face in front of everyone, and the bully pulls a startled, wounded expression and we know that they will never dare to try this with anyone ever again) and the reality.

In reality (at least from what I witnessed), the victim doesn’t have the power to fight back once, heroically and cathartically, and put a stop to the bullying - because the violence by the bully is viewed as socially disciplined and purposeful, while any violence carried out by the victim is seen as an outrage, an explosion, something undignified and dangerous and crazy. Nobody thinks the bully is a dangerous sadist who needs to go to counselling, but everyone will think that the victim who strikes back has something wrong with them.

So that’s something the episode worries over, again and again - the Magdas who remain a passive victim and the Magdas who strike back are both still caught in the same pattern of ostracism from their peers, and there is no escape. (Which of course mirrors David’s own situation with Eskew.)

"He makes a small noise of distress, his eyes rolling up to meet us…"

The human tent doesn’t really have anything to do with anything (and it gives Magda body horror powers that she doesn’t display elsewhere in the episode), so it’s a little bit of a cheat - just a grotesque image to get us to the next sequence. But it is a flesh-as-canvas motif that we’ve used before, particularly with Embroidery.

"The older children repeat Mr Brodsky’s own thesis; that there was something wrong with Magda."

This episode definitely gave me more than my usual habitual release-panic, when we put it out. I think (I don’t really know why) that I was worried listeners would somehow assume we were taking the part of the other students, that we agreed that there was something innately, ineffably wrong with Magda.

But again, I think this is the episode where I think we’ve had the most people contacting us to say thank-you for writing it. People who at one time or another in their lives have been told that there’s something wrong with them that needs fixing - thanks to the cruelty and incuriosity and insecurity of others who cling to the belief that they are better because they cannot be described as different.

So I remain relieved and massively grateful for the people who’ve engaged with the writing and who’ve got what we were trying to do.

"There is joy in going unseen. It removes you from the moral equation."

I think we hint here at a theme we tee up heavily for the upcoming episode - what happens to David when he ceases to be Eskew’s victim, and becomes a witness to its horrors instead?

And we wanted to explore the relief and the guilt that comes along with that, the very real sense that any weight taken off his back is adding to the suffering of those beneath him.

"I will keep my watch over this immense crucible of pain, and wait to see what grows."

We had no real ending for this episode, and that felt appropriate; David doesn’t descend into the heart of the school and vanquish something horrible down there, he doesn’t figure out a solution to the puzzle.

This is just something that’s been going on forever, and will go on long after he stops paying attention.

Episode 21: Border

This is an obvious, simple-message episode - in effect, it’s a vehicle to get Riyo into Eskew, and to properly motivate her to destroy it, and I think you can feel that in how sketchily the various interrogators are drawn.

Beyond the basic concern over the treatment of immigrants (which I think we were particularly feeling at the time - as a couple it was a running joke that Muna would get stopped and flagged at airports when she was travelling alone, but that she’d sail through when she was with me, but I think that had become a lot more serious post-Brexit with European passports and settled status still being up in the air), I think there’s also a preoccupation with heroic status and the protections that are offered to us.

David was welcomed into Eskew with open arms; Riyo is forced to wait and justify herself; others, nameless and without status, are wiped out before they even arrive.

I think we were beginning to worry about David’s plot armour at this point and what that said about him - as, basically, yet another middle-class white horror podcast narrator who never quite seems to die.

There’s also a repeated suggestion that Eskew welcomes in those who feel like they belong nowhere at all, and this is how it chooses the people it loves.

And I remember I liked the idea of doing our take on the classic ‘creepy painting with a figure that gets closer and closer’ (which I believe first appeared in an MR James story, The Mezzotint, but it’s shown up in variations ever since) with a tourism poster that depicts the apparent self-destruction of a family unit, similar to what David experienced back in Illumination.

Episode 21: Ingratitude

This episode is definitely in my top three for the show - it felt like taking a big swing, which was exactly what we needed to do at this point in proceedings!

Like Cruelty, it’s a horror story where it’s all about the horror happening to somebody else - nothing particularly scary or grotesque even happens to David for some time, and yet it is a pretty traumatising listen to say the least.

But it also has a lot of humour in it, because we’re at the stage where we can really play with David’s genre-savviness; he knows this is a trick of some kind that’s bound to backfire on him - it must be a trick that Eskew has provided him with a daughter, and he’s desperate to figure out how that’s happened.

And then as the episode goes on, we begin to show that this ultra-caution and distrust isn’t funny at all, it’s a defence mechanism that’s going to destroy him and keep on destroying him no matter if he leaves Eskew behind.

"She keeps insisting that the monster was right there, Happy Jack Adam, walking on the ceiling, and it lowered its long black neck until its face was level with her face and it looked at her."

I don’t remember what made us think of the name Happy Jack Adam - it was more a rhythmic thing than anything else, the appa - acc - adda - repetition sounding a little bit kike snapping teeth.

“Do you remember the words I told you then?” I ask, inventing wildly. “The ones that would protect you against any monsters?”

Something that shows up in The Silt Verses as well is kindled here - the idea of a reality that is so uncertain and untrustworthy, so rooted in the subjective, that it can basically be altered by assertion.

David, as if he’s in a lucid dream, can reshape the reality of Eskew - so long as he plays along with its broad brush strokes.

I loved that idea at the time both for the opportunities it opened up for the storytelling and as a way of giving him additional agency (demonstrating his character growth) without pitting him directly against the city.

So we return to that in Festivity, shortly afterwards.

"I know she must be some hideous glitch or mutation of Eskew because there is no creature in this or any other reality that could find satisfaction and humour in doing the same thing so many times."

We’re having fun with the idea that a toddler’s impulsivity and obsessive behaviour could make them across as some kind of doppelganger only pretending to be a child - but I think I was also playing off Stephen King’s short story Suffer The Little Children, which had a big impact on me when I first read it.

"And sooner or later she’ll spring her trick on me, changing into something fleshy and toothed and vile, some twisted approximation of humanity, and I will have to run for my life with her screeching in my ears knowing that this time has been wasted, time I could have used to escape."

It’s a very particular sensation, reading this back to yourself and then going, ‘oh, this is obviously about the trauma response of someone with complex PTSD who cannot bring themselves to form meaningful relationships due to an obsessive distrust and belief than others will inevitably turn on them.’

Because I had absolutely no idea that’s what I was getting at at the time - but yeah, that’s what the episode is about.

"Holding that small weight in my arms, I run out across the park, in the vague direction of a doctor’s or a pharmacy, anything at all where they might be able to fix my daughter and make her well again, but the black hole is opening out across my daughter’s head, spreading downwards over her throat and up her fingertips, swallowing my daughter up from every direction until there’s less and less of her, only her mouth which keeps moving, keeps accusing me to the last second, and then my daughter is gone and I’m holding nothing at all."

When I was a kid, someone told me the classic quasi-urban myth story about how they knew a dad who was a helicopter pilot, and who stepped out of the helicopter to greet his child, but he lifted them up too high and caught them in the rotor blades.

Since then I have always been quietly a bit petrified of picking up kids in case I (figuratively or literally) accidentally catch them in the rotor blades of a passing helicopter. Or drop them, which is probably a bit more likely.

So this was a really upsetting scene to record, as it’s playing on a real-life fear. Although I do like the depiction of Lucia being winked from existence - it’s a little bit Twin Peaks, a little bit Death of Pacman.

"You reject everything you’re given, you hunt for the flaws...why can’t you just live here?"

This final scene is quite funny to me, because of course on a metaphorical level it makes sense as a criticism of someone who’s too traumatised and paranoid to let themselves find peace…but on a literal level, David is being gaslit by Cosmic Horror Hell about how upsetting it is that he isn't enjoying himself there.

“Have you at least thought about what we’re going to tell our son?”

I thought of the stinger early on, and it delights me - I think it’s our most successful attempt to do a Junji Ito-inspired punchline (I’m thinking in particular of the horrible scene in one of his stories where a Mother-Thing comes clattering down the stairs towards the protagonist in the very final panel) where the monster just bursts out at the end. 

And it works better because the episode hasn't been working to scare us, so it feels like a genuine intrusion from something very nasty.

Next time - we play an April Fool’s joke on David, and we head to the museum.