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The Medium
‘This is a story of our life, it’s about how we died and learnt to survive, by taking messages for the dead. What do they call us? Medium. The Medium.
To read The Medium is to be submerged in a stream of Consciousness populated by uninvited voices from the underworld. Animated, urgent, and brutally propulsive, this cacophony of competing narratives begins to upset the boundary between the living and the dead. The Medium is an alchemical novel, shimmering with insight from the depths of a black lake.
‘We will try and tell them about the mediumship... it’s like trying to answer an invisible telephone on a ship that’s about to split in two, with waves crashing over-deck, everything sliding about with everyone screaming for your help and you’re afraid, and you don’t know who is calling or where they are calling from, all you can hear is people shouting at you from a thousand different directions and you’re going to be sick and piss yourself.’
To read The Medium is to be submerged in a stream of Consciousness populated by uninvited voices from the underworld. Animated, urgent, and brutally propulsive, this cacophony of competing narratives begins to upset the boundary between the living and the dead. The Medium is an alchemical novel, shimmering with insight from the depths of a black lake.
‘We will try and tell them about the mediumship... it’s like trying to answer an invisible telephone on a ship that’s about to split in two, with waves crashing over-deck, everything sliding about with everyone screaming for your help and you’re afraid, and you don’t know who is calling or where they are calling from, all you can hear is people shouting at you from a thousand different directions and you’re going to be sick and piss yourself.’
178 pages, Paperback
Published June 1, 2024
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October 30, 2024
I’m scared. Of what? Them. The voices. So many voices. I wouldn’t mind if it was just voices, but I don’t like it when they touch us. When they get inside and take our hands for theirs. It’s horrible. I have always hated that part too. Why do they do it? I still don’t really know. I’ve been trying to find books that explain stuff. Like this one? Not really like this one. This is a story of our life, it’s about how we died and learnt to survive, by taking messages for the dead. What do they call us? Medium. The Medium.
Alice Walter describes The Medium, as 'a polyvocal psychic coming-of-age story, that seeks to question the boundaries between psychosis and psychic ability - with the aim of broadening spiritual awareness and advocating for better bridging between language and care.'
The Medium covers thirty years in the life of its protagonist, and first-person narrator of large parts of the text, starting with an incident when she was 6 when, lured by a figure who appears at her window, she is drawn to a lake where she may, or may not, drown. Indeed for her one part of her dies, and another self lives on, but finds herself in communion with the dead - a form of medium or (as the author has described herself) pyschopomp.
Interweaved with her first person story are passages of relatively unpunctuated conversations, through which we see the narrator through others' eyes - her parents; her classmates and teachers; those to whom she tries to pass messages, some comforted, others hostile; and a succession of doctors, counsellors and therapists.
This her parents towards the end of her primary school years:
Bullied? Really? I doubt it. Where is she now? Bed. She’s sleeping way too much. She’s too young to be acting like a teenager. Did you tell the doctor that she’s sleeping all day? No, did you? No. I wasn’t the one who took her. Yeah, I know. It was me, again. Well, what did he say? I didn’t mention the sleeping. It’s sleep. Kids sleep! Not like this, and sleepwalking. I don’t know whether to wake her up, or – I don’t know. Do we lock her in? At night, so she doesn’t fall down the stairs? She’s not going to fall down the stairs. She could. She just stands there, staring at the landing wall. Will you talk to her? About the wall? About the sleepwalking. What is there to say? You’re right. There’s nothing to say. It’s better than the night terrors. True. I can’t keep waking up to hear her screaming, it’s like being in a war zone. Maybe she could take something? To calm her at night. A herbal tea, or something stronger. It’s me that could do with taking something. You take a bottle of wine before bed, and from the snoring, I would say you’re sleeping just fine. My snoring? It’s your snoring that’s probably giving her nightmares. The whole house shakes. Oh, shut up. It’ll just be a phase. Which bit? She’s not being bullied. As soon as they into secondary, all the classes switch anyway, so she’ll make new friends then, I guess. It’s hard not having anyone for her to play with. She never wants to play. I know, that’s a worry too.
Others see her behaviour as sympomatic of psychosis, and she does pose the question to herselves:
I think that our behaviours and poor coping mechanisms are due to a psychological pattern of maladaptation. Perhaps deeply repressed emotions have had to take form through a spiritual understanding. Essentially, it’s meaning-making in place of missing context.
So, you don’t believe that I can hear the dead?
I don’t think there is any use pitting psychoanalysis and spirituality against each other, but I do think, if I’m being really honest – and I don’t want to undermine what you’ve written – that we did die at the lake that day, and that, at some point before the dying, put simply, love was lost.
But that isn't true to her experience or her memories:
We were this way all along, we just had to remember. What? That we are here to speak on behalf of the dead. But not for them. No. They come to us with words for the living. We are a bridge between worlds. A wonky bridge, like one of those long rope ones that swings and groans, with rotten bits, ready to snap at any moment. It’s a path that’s pushed me into madness. Sentenced to silence yet surrounded by voices, dead and alive. Destined to die, over and over again, until we remembered who we are meant to become. You’re ignoring me. Drowning in shadows and diagnoses. didn’t want to put on the backwards jacket, with the straps. It was all itchy and I couldn’t breathe. Rough round my neck. I’m not ignoring you. I’m just trying to tell the story. What about the bit in the hospital? Or that wedding we went to. Yes, we will get to that. I keep forgetting what I’m trying to say. Where were we? At the beginning. The black lake. You know, the lady who found us after we were dragged out of the lake. Resuscitated. Blown back up, by the bird man. She dropped us off, and didn’t say anything. Maybe she did, you just can’t remember. Do you remember the bird man? In a way. When I got home, I was invisible. No one saw me walk upstairs into my room. Weird, like I had disappeared; magic, but not. Was I dead? A part of you was. Then the voices came. The alive saying, be quiet, and the invisibles saying, speak, speak. It wasn’t nice. We heard all the voices but no one would listen to us.
In one sense, this uses some standard horror tropes but is given added depth (and becomes somewhat disturbing) as this does seem to be rooted in the author's own experience - she also describes the book as a memoir. The author's website also has a number of haunting videos associated with the text, such as this using some of the words that open my review overlaid on Placebo's The Crawl by Placebo.
The publisher
Book Works is a leading contemporary arts organisation with a unique role as makers and publishers of artists’ books.
Book Works Publishing is dedicated to commissioning and supporting new work by emerging artists. Our projects are initiated by invitation, open submission, and through guest-curated projects and include publishing, a lecture and seminar programme, exhibitions, the development of an online archive, and artists’ surgeries and workshops.
Our audience is vital to our work. The process of engaging and developing our audience is initiated with our commissioning programme, and driven through all aspects of our activities, particularly our public programme of events, our workshops, artists surgeries and education activities, and through our interest in collaborating with other organisations and libraries. Our programme of commissions is diverse, and reflects our commitment not just to work with cultural workers from all backgrounds, but to invest in networks and programmes that engage, and develop and create new artistic voices.
Alice Walter describes The Medium, as 'a polyvocal psychic coming-of-age story, that seeks to question the boundaries between psychosis and psychic ability - with the aim of broadening spiritual awareness and advocating for better bridging between language and care.'
The Medium covers thirty years in the life of its protagonist, and first-person narrator of large parts of the text, starting with an incident when she was 6 when, lured by a figure who appears at her window, she is drawn to a lake where she may, or may not, drown. Indeed for her one part of her dies, and another self lives on, but finds herself in communion with the dead - a form of medium or (as the author has described herself) pyschopomp.
Interweaved with her first person story are passages of relatively unpunctuated conversations, through which we see the narrator through others' eyes - her parents; her classmates and teachers; those to whom she tries to pass messages, some comforted, others hostile; and a succession of doctors, counsellors and therapists.
This her parents towards the end of her primary school years:
Bullied? Really? I doubt it. Where is she now? Bed. She’s sleeping way too much. She’s too young to be acting like a teenager. Did you tell the doctor that she’s sleeping all day? No, did you? No. I wasn’t the one who took her. Yeah, I know. It was me, again. Well, what did he say? I didn’t mention the sleeping. It’s sleep. Kids sleep! Not like this, and sleepwalking. I don’t know whether to wake her up, or – I don’t know. Do we lock her in? At night, so she doesn’t fall down the stairs? She’s not going to fall down the stairs. She could. She just stands there, staring at the landing wall. Will you talk to her? About the wall? About the sleepwalking. What is there to say? You’re right. There’s nothing to say. It’s better than the night terrors. True. I can’t keep waking up to hear her screaming, it’s like being in a war zone. Maybe she could take something? To calm her at night. A herbal tea, or something stronger. It’s me that could do with taking something. You take a bottle of wine before bed, and from the snoring, I would say you’re sleeping just fine. My snoring? It’s your snoring that’s probably giving her nightmares. The whole house shakes. Oh, shut up. It’ll just be a phase. Which bit? She’s not being bullied. As soon as they into secondary, all the classes switch anyway, so she’ll make new friends then, I guess. It’s hard not having anyone for her to play with. She never wants to play. I know, that’s a worry too.
Others see her behaviour as sympomatic of psychosis, and she does pose the question to herselves:
I think that our behaviours and poor coping mechanisms are due to a psychological pattern of maladaptation. Perhaps deeply repressed emotions have had to take form through a spiritual understanding. Essentially, it’s meaning-making in place of missing context.
So, you don’t believe that I can hear the dead?
I don’t think there is any use pitting psychoanalysis and spirituality against each other, but I do think, if I’m being really honest – and I don’t want to undermine what you’ve written – that we did die at the lake that day, and that, at some point before the dying, put simply, love was lost.
But that isn't true to her experience or her memories:
We were this way all along, we just had to remember. What? That we are here to speak on behalf of the dead. But not for them. No. They come to us with words for the living. We are a bridge between worlds. A wonky bridge, like one of those long rope ones that swings and groans, with rotten bits, ready to snap at any moment. It’s a path that’s pushed me into madness. Sentenced to silence yet surrounded by voices, dead and alive. Destined to die, over and over again, until we remembered who we are meant to become. You’re ignoring me. Drowning in shadows and diagnoses. didn’t want to put on the backwards jacket, with the straps. It was all itchy and I couldn’t breathe. Rough round my neck. I’m not ignoring you. I’m just trying to tell the story. What about the bit in the hospital? Or that wedding we went to. Yes, we will get to that. I keep forgetting what I’m trying to say. Where were we? At the beginning. The black lake. You know, the lady who found us after we were dragged out of the lake. Resuscitated. Blown back up, by the bird man. She dropped us off, and didn’t say anything. Maybe she did, you just can’t remember. Do you remember the bird man? In a way. When I got home, I was invisible. No one saw me walk upstairs into my room. Weird, like I had disappeared; magic, but not. Was I dead? A part of you was. Then the voices came. The alive saying, be quiet, and the invisibles saying, speak, speak. It wasn’t nice. We heard all the voices but no one would listen to us.
In one sense, this uses some standard horror tropes but is given added depth (and becomes somewhat disturbing) as this does seem to be rooted in the author's own experience - she also describes the book as a memoir. The author's website also has a number of haunting videos associated with the text, such as this using some of the words that open my review overlaid on Placebo's The Crawl by Placebo.
The publisher
Book Works is a leading contemporary arts organisation with a unique role as makers and publishers of artists’ books.
Book Works Publishing is dedicated to commissioning and supporting new work by emerging artists. Our projects are initiated by invitation, open submission, and through guest-curated projects and include publishing, a lecture and seminar programme, exhibitions, the development of an online archive, and artists’ surgeries and workshops.
Our audience is vital to our work. The process of engaging and developing our audience is initiated with our commissioning programme, and driven through all aspects of our activities, particularly our public programme of events, our workshops, artists surgeries and education activities, and through our interest in collaborating with other organisations and libraries. Our programme of commissions is diverse, and reflects our commitment not just to work with cultural workers from all backgrounds, but to invest in networks and programmes that engage, and develop and create new artistic voices.
September 23, 2024
Quite effective in what it sets out to do, and at certain points it's truly scary, but it lacked that little something to make it really great.
August 17, 2025
The chapters have nice names.
As one chapter ends I think I’m supposed to reflect on what I’ve read.
We heard all the voices but no one would listen to us./We were lost.
Someone must know where she is./Hard Truths Mike Leigh arguments. A book told in arguing. It has to be just right.
In the shade I’m making./For ‘The Crucible,’ ’We Have Always Lived in the Castle’ witchy lover.
Beyond the crossing./That between the sequence of events, the building suspense/mystery to something super-supernatural she fears not just getting in trouble but being refused her dream hamster because of it. That this girl still desires something “cute.” She’s six, but knows death better than anyone. And she can still revel in a crooning hamster (though she might hold herself back but you hope this is something she can have all to herself).
Death had its own path for us to follow./Using names of relevance. Picking up a book at random in a shop entails fate, or I should say what you put in the book is clairvoyance relating to they who’ll read it.
Everyone wanted to say something./She goes through what a nurse goes through.
Don’t listen to them they are trying to trick you./The simple sentences started to drag, I was taken out of it.
A door held open by the demon./‘The Exorcist’ reference takes the piss. At a basic aesthetic level, she doesn’t explain her feeling watching it, she tells us that she relates.
Who the fuck are you./A writer lacks the tools to bring out the beauty and perspective. First person feels easiest when you don’t have the tools. If you can tell a writer hasn’t read the Russians…
Another death to end this life half-lived./Started to realise I was doing the heavy lifting applying meaning and drama to something that doesn’t have enough of it.
There, at the edge of the black lake, the ground gave way./“I feel certain now that the boundary between life and death is hardly a boundary at all.” Yeah she’s a medium we all understand thats the whole idea from the start.
A cafe called Return to Oz on Grange Rd. When I look it up it’s “Permanently Closed.”/‘Return to Oz’ is showing at Curzon on Pitfield St. (I looked up “Return to Oz cafe” thinking there’d be some write up on it in days gone by. Surely when it opened some local paper got to know the owners and wrote thoughtfully on the interior design, menu and people, could be in the library newspaper archives but to find our I’d have to dig. All I can find online is a photo of the shop front when it was open.
As one chapter ends I think I’m supposed to reflect on what I’ve read.
We heard all the voices but no one would listen to us./We were lost.
Someone must know where she is./Hard Truths Mike Leigh arguments. A book told in arguing. It has to be just right.
In the shade I’m making./For ‘The Crucible,’ ’We Have Always Lived in the Castle’ witchy lover.
Beyond the crossing./That between the sequence of events, the building suspense/mystery to something super-supernatural she fears not just getting in trouble but being refused her dream hamster because of it. That this girl still desires something “cute.” She’s six, but knows death better than anyone. And she can still revel in a crooning hamster (though she might hold herself back but you hope this is something she can have all to herself).
Death had its own path for us to follow./Using names of relevance. Picking up a book at random in a shop entails fate, or I should say what you put in the book is clairvoyance relating to they who’ll read it.
Everyone wanted to say something./She goes through what a nurse goes through.
Don’t listen to them they are trying to trick you./The simple sentences started to drag, I was taken out of it.
A door held open by the demon./‘The Exorcist’ reference takes the piss. At a basic aesthetic level, she doesn’t explain her feeling watching it, she tells us that she relates.
Who the fuck are you./A writer lacks the tools to bring out the beauty and perspective. First person feels easiest when you don’t have the tools. If you can tell a writer hasn’t read the Russians…
Another death to end this life half-lived./Started to realise I was doing the heavy lifting applying meaning and drama to something that doesn’t have enough of it.
There, at the edge of the black lake, the ground gave way./“I feel certain now that the boundary between life and death is hardly a boundary at all.” Yeah she’s a medium we all understand thats the whole idea from the start.
A cafe called Return to Oz on Grange Rd. When I look it up it’s “Permanently Closed.”/‘Return to Oz’ is showing at Curzon on Pitfield St. (I looked up “Return to Oz cafe” thinking there’d be some write up on it in days gone by. Surely when it opened some local paper got to know the owners and wrote thoughtfully on the interior design, menu and people, could be in the library newspaper archives but to find our I’d have to dig. All I can find online is a photo of the shop front when it was open.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews