Eskew by Episode I: Correspondence

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

This week, we're talking about Episode I: Correspondence, which introduces David Ward and finds him investigating a series of mysterious love letters.

Jon:

The basic concept of Eskew came out of a writing challenge with an old friend of mine back in 2015, where we were sending these deadpan horror flash-fictions back and forth to each other via email.

As a unifying framework for these flash-fictions, we started laying out the idea that they were snippets of everyday life, or public announcements, from this one specific nightmare city where everything is horribly off-kilter, but life goes on - you just have to commute to work, survive the office, and spend the evening at home even as things and people distort monstrously all around you.

The name was something that we came up with, as part of this game. It’s obviously based on askew, but it also felt like it had some other connotations lurking beneath the surface as well (Es-Crow, Krakow, Escher…).

Here are a few of them that, I think, relate pretty directly to the show as it eventually becomes:

I enjoyed the play, but was unprepared for what came next; the actors following us home down the lamplit streets, walking in perfect diagonal formation, unsmiling beneath their masks.

We’ve drawn the shutters, but we can still hear them clapping.

***

I can’t say I believe in curses, but there’s a busker in the underground tunnels who’s forever playing the same tune, off-key and ugly, on a black recorder.

Nobody gives him any money, and yet he won’t stop laughing at us.

***

I made painted handprints with Felicity. Despite how evenly I ensured her hands were covered in paint, the imprint came out like a fleshy claw.

I mentioned it to Lisa that evening, but she just ran sobbing from the room.

***

Typically, you’ve planned for a nice weekend away from it all with your wife and three giggling children, then you turn a street corner, and quite suddenly you’re alone in the car, the suitcases are all full of bloodied white swan’s feathers, and you’re back here in the cold and empty heart of Eskew.

As to the shape and layout of Eskew itself, we’d recently been on a couple of breaks in continental Europe - to Lisbon and to Budapest, and I really loved the verticality of both cities, these long winding stairwells and perilously steep streets that made them feel quite magical and strange to explore.

Muna:

Yes - but more than that, you’ve always had a fascination with urban decay, right? We live near a train track, and amongst the rails there stand several crumbling pillars, like stubby fingers that have healed with jagged edges, reaching upwards. It’s on quite a busy little path, leading to several residential streets. Most people pass quickly.

I can’t count the amount of times we’ve stood there or remarked on it as we’ve passed. Eskew reminds me of that, of a city crumbling while everyone rushes on past it, completely enmeshed in their own life amongst the ruin.

Jon:

That’s beautiful. Yes, abandoned places! Ruinous places.They’re incredible.

Jon:

OK, so I don’t think I ever became a masterful audio editor during the making of this podcast, but this episode sounds particularly rough: I hadn’t figured out how to even construct a blanket-fort sound booth, the rain SFX here is a very crude and short loop, and for the first few episodes I pointlessly meddle with my voice to make it pitch a little lower because I was nervous about how I sounded.

(This is why some people think on their first listen that the voice actor is swapped out - it’s me all the way through the series, I just stop faffing about with the pitch.)

Jon:

Originally we had the idea that David would remain at the Eskew Tribunal throughout the podcast, as a kind of roving reporter who’s sent out to investigate various bizarre aspects of the city. 

You can see that emphasis on journalism as the driving force behind each narrative throughout these first few episodes, which then gets very quickly dropped after Episode 5.

I honestly don’t remember why we decided to scrap the approach during the writing of Illumination.

It might have been because the format gives David too much safety and agency - if he’s investigating the happenings in the city on a case by case basis (oh, no, there’s been a murder down at the Eskew Fish Market!), that’s a very different format to what we end up with, which is him attempting to survive the city as it happens to him very directly, day after day after day.

Or perhaps I was just in a mood to burn the things I’d built.

Muna:

Yes, I remember us discussing this. I think originally we thought this would be a series of articles or tapes left by him, found by others. 

It does feel as if that wouldn’t have been quite as powerful; there were chapters I read that quite literally made me shudder in fear. I’m not sure that would have come across as well if that journalistic format had continued, and David had remained somewhat distant from all the action.

Jon:

Some early-season weirdness in this episode, as well: the Eskew Tribunal apparently has an international news section, and up-to-date information about contemporary events. Let’s not think too hard about how that works.

Jon:

If we started from scratch, I’d probably shelve this episode and start the series from Episode 2 instead - I’ve seen that some people really like this one, but I honestly don’t think it puts the podcast’s best foot forward. 

Generally speaking, I see shortform horror as following a similar basic structure to a stand-up comedy routine: you have the setup that lays the seeds and maybe sows a bit of misdirection, you have the build-up that increases the tension and uncertainty, and then you lay it all out with a climactic and crucial WHAM moment that brings everything together and makes awful sense of what we've seen. (In his ‘non-fiction’ epilogue to Uzumaki, Junji Ito even calls it a ‘punchline’, which I think is totally apt).

And for me, this is an episode where the build-up is too convoluted, and the punchline too undynamic, to really be satisfying. We spend too long escalating the weirdness with various fleshy items of romance, and then at the end of it we just end up with a scary face and David runs away? We can do better than this!

Muna:

No, I disagree. I think this episode is quite raw, but this rawness is what I think others have connected with. I remember reading the very first draft and the gut-punch I felt of the Away Day section really resonated. I’ve always worked in office, starting as young as 17, and I genuinely believe there is a simmering level of insanity just below the veneer of co-workers’ civility, very similar to what happens in this chapter. It’s something that comes up again and again in later episodes.

Or maybe that’s just me!

Jon:

See, interestingly, the Away Day section (where the entire floor of journalists just lose their minds collectively and vanish) was one of the original flash fictions, and to me that comes across - it reads like something that’s been flown in from another episode entirely.

I do quite like it, but I think it’s really out of tone with the more stable version of Eskew that appears here, and a lot more like what we’ll end up with later on.

Jon:

Thematically, I think this episode does at least lay out what I think is a key idea for the series - that when you’re accustomed to not fitting in with the rest of humanity and you’ve built your identity around that, the notion of connecting meaningfully with someone or something else can feel like an existential threat to your individuality. It becomes a fear that we might find ourselves facing assimilation rather than union.

I’m a big Jung dork and I have vivid yet vague memories of reading about a case of his, with a young man about to be married who was experiencing nightmares. Jung told the young man that he naturally feared being swallowed up by his fiancee’s personality, rather than attaining a sacred union of equals. 

David is very much going through that, in an overly literal sense; he fears that a perfect love and a total acceptance will change him.

But he's still lonely. He's on the outside, looking in, wondering why he doesn't understand.

Muna:

When you’ve said that, this actually reminds me of Eraserhead, by David Lynch? This sort of whirring of life, happening around us all and that we seem to be taking part in, yet we feel very removed from it all.

I think thematically a key for the series is also trying to constantly follow the set guidelines for fitting in, right? Getting a job, a partner, getting married, having children. But all of it is distorted and there is almost an unasked set of questions within oneself, voicing your fears: is that normal? Is this how others also feel? Or is the distortion because *I* am the one infecting and ruining that which others can casually do and achieve?

Jon:

I love Eraserhead! Let’s rewatch Eraserhead.

And yes, it’s definitely a big influence on the series, most obviously in the way that reality shifts around David, events moving uncontrollably forward without his input (like the dinner party scene) - and with the episode Ingratitude much later on, when David gets an unwanted daughter, that influence becomes a blatant pastiche.

Anyway, it is quite strange in retrospect that - in an episode where lovers literally merge together and then invite a third party to join them - we never really reflect on sex, gender or sexuality in any particularly interesting way. 

(We do fit in a deeply uncomfortable reading of ‘I’m coming’, at least? Sorry about that.)

Jon:

Looking back - and this is a positive, it's an incredible thing - I have no idea how anyone ended up listening to this show.

I was never smart about marketing it. I didn't have a distribution plan. I think I dropped a link on Reddit and sent a couple of awkward #AudioDramaSunday tweets before stopping because nobody was engaging and it was too awkward. 

We did get a nice shout-out from Ely at The Bello Collective in a January 2018 'new audio fiction' round-up, which really helped to get some people listening, but again we didn't have a press release or any of the very sensible things you definitely should do when launching a new show.

Anyway, I guess I'm saying that if you're trying to create something weird and independent on the internet, total incompetence on your part doesn't necessarily need to be a barrier to finding an audience who like what you're doing, and that's absolutely awesome.

Next week: we discuss art, architecture and chalk-faced nightmares with Episode II: Reproduction.