Eskew by Episode: Reflection, Leakage, Bug

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

Follow along with us as we go!

Episode 17: Reflection

Lost and alone on the streets of Eskew, David strays into double trouble.

"When I was a child and in London, I’d walk to school past an old, unkempt churchyard..."

I think there was some definite panic after I’d written Tenancy, because David ends up living in the walls! Where do you take him after that? You can’t just reset everything!

And so, perhaps, there was a little bit of a desperate grabbing for a plotline, any kind of plotline, and inevitably after David had retained his flat as a safe haven for so long in the series, it made sense that we’d be chucking him out of it. 

I think I was also just a bit tired of the guy and his security and stability in the narrative; always whining, always terrified, ultimately always getting out of the situation in one piece!

I wasn’t a child like David says he was, but when I first moved to London, I did identify a churchyard in Hampstead where there was a huge, heavy stone monument right at the back that would provide the perfect hiding place of relative safety and quiet if I ever found myself homeless and had to sleep rough. (Becoming homeless and having to sleep rough wasn’t realistically in any way on the cards, but like the guy who posted on Reddit because he wanted to know if groups were illegal, I just worry about things a lot.)

At the time I wrote this episode, I was also working in an office in the City of London - lots of bankers, lots of white-collar workers all streaming into their skyscrapers and glass office blocks at the same time, and in the margins at the base of these skyscrapers, you’d see the base camps of the people who came in to inhabit the city at night; rough sleepers buried beneath their makeshift shelters like climbers on an expedition, being woken up and moved on by security guards and patrolling police officers…

It feels almost too crude and too cruel to be real, those two worlds passing each other by without acknowledgement or connection.

It’s a bit grim, reading back through this, because there’s no subtext or even surreality to the horror in the first section, and like a lot of things in the UK, the rough sleeping crisis has got worse since I wrote it. Despite some anti-hostile architecture and temporary rehousing pushes by London’s mayoral office during the pandemic, in 2020/2021, there were a record 10,000 people sleeping rough in this city, with close to 150 deaths.

A majority of rough sleepers report an increase year-on-year in hostile architecture implementations, including one quite memorable incident in 2019 when MPs essentially drove the rough-sleeping population of Westminster out because they didn't like having to walk past human reminders of the social inequality they had helped to foster every morning on their way to work.

How do you live in a city and not feel complicit in all of that?

"They’re crude and stupid and horrible, little gurning faces in little picked-out uniforms..."

I don’t even think Ligotti’s mannequins and puppets are good horror! I think they feel like a literary theme in search of some actual creepiness and I roll my eyes whenever they show up in his stories! So you can gather that I was definitely grasping for straws at this point, trying to think of something horrible or original that could happen to David, by the fact that I ended up using them in this episode.

It was just a real, “fuck it, let’s throw in some evil puppets” moment. I have contempt for myself for indulging this.

"This is change, then. All that Eskew’s ever had for me, is change."

Evil David is perhaps the same kind of unoriginal trope - it's quite similar to the powerful and shadowy reality-shaping entity that the protagonist of My Work Is Not Yet Done by Ligotti transforms into - but I remember at the time I was really intrigued by the idea of using binaural sound to have two different Davids at once, a different listening experience depending on the earphone the listener was using. (I knew nothing, so I didn’t understand just how much of an accessibility nightmare this was.)

I also really liked the suggestion of a horror that David is basically oblivious to - his own shadow self causing havoc and destruction across the city, with a freedom and an agency that he’s never possessed.

It starts to get us to the question at the end of the show: if you are so embedded in the system, so accustomed to it, so dependent upon it, that no matter how awful it is and how much it hurts you are incapable of getting away from it...then what would you need to become, to make yourself capable of genuine change?

Episode 18: Leakage

A witness observes the outbreak of rapid - and unusual - construction.

"They’re building a tower."

I think the dissatisfaction and restlessness I was feeling with David’s story at this point was very much what led me into trying to shake up the perspective. I was interested in the idea of portraying the encroachment of Eskew into our reality, and opening up more opportunities for architectural horror in the process.

That began with the idea of gentrification as a purely inhuman and purposeless threat.

We do often see gentrification portrayed as an antagonistic force in fiction, but it’s usually through flawed and caricatured human villains - scowling property developers or thoughtless hipsters strolling into the bodega to order a macchiato or whatever.

I thought it would be a lot more fun to instead focus on the new development itself as a force of anti-human beauty and terror and strangeness.

Again, this was based very much on my reality of the time - you can’t commute into London every day and avoid the sight of new luxury-flat developments being built. Many of these are bought up by investors and consequently remain empty, while others remain entirely unsold; one report found that 64% of homes over £5 million in the city are unoccupied!

So it’s the horrifying image of a ghost city, an anti-city; towers and apartments that have been built in order to have value, value which would diminish if anyone was actually daring to live in them.

"Truth_to_power:

THE VIEW IS RUINED WHAT ARE YOU DOING THIS FOR WHY DOESN’T ANYONE TALK TO US"

I have definitely had that experience of writing something in comments sections that I think is provocative and challenging, worrying endlessly about the response to it as if I’m going to get torn to pieces by a horde of dissenting commenters, and then realising that absolutely nobody has responded to it because nobody online gives a shit what I think.

It’s a good reality check.

I’ve never astro-turfed, as the witness does in this episode, but I am a bit obsessed with the concept. (Is anyone online real? Does everyone have a secret agenda that they’re not admitting to? Can any perspective here actually be trusted? It’s easy to spiral. I should probably not be online.)

I have, though, carried out Google research into horror topics using awkward phrasing that makes it clear to some imagined CIA spy that THIS IS ONLY FOR FICTIONAL PURPOSES.

"It’s only once the first delivery arrives that the witness realises his mistake."

Were I so inclined, I would also definitely get to the stage of physically constructing a nail-bomb before realising that nail-bombs can’t be used to destroy a building. This whole episode is deeply relatable to me, to be honest.

“The deeper they excavate, the higher they’ll build.”

Honestly, nobody ever talks about this episode, but I really like it, from beginning to end, I think it's one of my favourites.

It conveys a lot of what I’m interested in for this show - obsession, human transformation in the face of inhuman and cancerous forces of the modern city, loneliness - in a way that feels very different from the rest of the action. (Maybe that’s why nobody talks about it!)

I think it's one of the only ones where I don't go completely overboard with the body horror in order to come up with something grotesque at the end - it's all in the suggestion that the hypnotised Witness is going to get eaten by rats!

Bug

Still without a home or hope, David makes a resolution.

"I need a place to go. Any place"

I’ve said in the past that this is one of my least favourite episodes, and several listeners have inevitably come out to tell me it’s one of their favourites!

We can call it even, but when I read this back or I listen to it again, I still struggle with it; I can feel the wild swing-swing-miss of the structure by a writer who’s struggling to get the narrative back to where it needs to go, in the first third of stray encounters on the streets of Eskew (which were basically unused and obviously random vignettes - the train station, the cinema) followed by the business of the repeating bug in the park which slows everything down.

To me it just feels like a very long and rambling trail that's meant to get David back to Allegra while creating a new sense of threat in his domestic situation, and to give him a bit of purpose in time for the next act of the show.

"But the bug just keeps on crawling, keeps on its dogged path to its own extinction..."

The bug bit - the agony of trying to deal humanely with something incredibly fragile and inhuman and a little bit repulsive - still resonates with me. I am the guy who tries to save an insect peacefully when it's crawling on me, then gets more and more agitated as it keeps crawling back to where it was, and then if I try and kill it as quickly and cleanly as possible, somehow I screw that up and it keeps twitching unhappily, it's still in pain...

I'm trying to be a good person, little dude! Why can there be no peace between us?

"It was a work thing. The town planners and the city architects. We were celebrating.”

I also think I - perhaps unfairly - associate this episode with my biggest regret for the show overall, which is the lack of any even implicit catalyst or explanation for Eskew’s outwards expansion into reality which becomes the endgame of the drama.

There were plenty of opportunities to cover that (it could have been Professor Henley and Riyo’s experiments, activity by the Orion Building Concern…anything!).

Instead it was a bit of an obvious asspull to move the story onwards. Just a pure unforced error. 

Honestly, I’d been so used to keeping the show essentially plotless that I think I was instinctively fearful of introducing anything that felt like an actual plot, and I was desperate not to suddenly give Eskew a face or a voice even though we were giving it a new motivation.

We could have dealt with that better. But this ep does lead into a sequence of episodes that I'm really proud of, at least!

Next time, it's trauma at school, trauma at border crossings, and trauma of unexpected parenting. It's trauma all the way!