I am in Eskew

by David Ward

Genres: Horror, Audiobook

30 pages, Audiobook

Published January 24, 2018

Reviews

[james · Rating 4 out of 5]

love when something makes me cry but i can’t quite figure out why, truly my most and least favourite media experience


david would survive the magnus archives, jon sims wouldn’t make it through a day in eskew

[Veronica · Rating 5 out of 5]

a podcast that makes you feel every human emotion at once.

[BoMo · Rating 5 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

[áine · Rating 5 out of 5]

possible my favourite piece of art ever. riyo duale i love you

[Vel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am in Eskew is not a book but a podcast and yet it's a wonderful work of literature all the same so I feel obligated to log it here.

It's post-modern literary horror at its finest. A beautiful, artistic meditation on loneliness and alienation which goes through so many unique ideas and changes to the environment. It's got a depressed British man narrating his life in a monotone, calming voice. It's got an ever-changing city of horrors which are just as benevolent as they are destructive. It's written in a depressing, yet wryly funny tone which never gets old and which knows how to hurt the listener when it needs to. What else do you even need?

I listened to the 30 episodes of this show over the course of an entire year, rationing them like nothing else. Not everything hit for me, not everything stuck, I forgot a lot of details, but the emotions evoked by it have stayed with me for all this time. I delayed listening to the final episode for about three months and now that I finally did that, I feel like something about the ending struck at my very core. Sad, ambiguous, hopeful, beautiful.

What a good podcast. Go check it out.

[Amy Mills · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mostly enjoyable horror fiction podcast about someone who finds himself trapped in the fictional (and horrifying) city of Eskew. There is a continuing narrative, but plenty of episodes would work fine on their own. I probably enjoyed those more than the continuity episodes, tbh.

The meta-narrative didn't do much for me, and I didn't particularly enjoy the ending. That said, I've had trouble imagining an ending that I would have enjoyed that would also have worked with the narrative to that point. It probably would have had to be a much more ambiguous ending.

Compared to most of the horror podcasts I've listened to, this one contains quite a bit more visceral detail that some may find unpleasant. It was not to the point it bothered me, only to the point that I noticed it more than in, say, The Magnus Archives.

Worth a listen if you like horror podcasts, as it's very well acted and produced. How well the story grabs you will probably vary.

[aspen · Rating 5 out of 5]

i loved this so much that i feel like i can’t even articulate my thoughts on it. so many lines that are probably some of my favorite writing ever.

i love the haunted architecture, i love the hostile environment, i love the fact that there is no specific humanized antagonist just an overwhelming unknowable force of violence, i love the critiques of capitalism and societal standards and adhering to a normal life with a job and a nuclear family, i love the constant seeking of a purpose and a place where you feel like you have a use (again tying back into productivity in capitalist society), i love the idea of a place where people go if they feel like they don’t belong anywhere else that turns out to be unending suffering and a place that twists their desire to fit in somewhere, i love the protagonist that gets genuinely fucked up by the horrors he witnesses and doesn’t have a guaranteed survival or happy ending, i love everything abt this fucking story!!!!!

this did a great job with things that i feel like other pieces of horror media have struggled with (such as magnus archives) which end up humanizing the supernatural horrors too much and end up making them not as scary. like this quote from the interview with the author by Mike Chapman:

I find this kind of stuff fascinating, because it plays into my own paranoia about environments, and my dislike of ghost stories with explicably human antagonists. Like David says in the first episode, people aren’t frightening. Places are frightening.

If I’m sitting alone at home on a dark and stormy night, and I glance nervously up towards the bedroom doorway, my fear is not that my house is being haunted by a spirit called Mabel who died in the 19th century at the age of fourteen and is constantly seeking her favourite teddy bear...because all of these details both humanise her and make her ridiculous.

My fear is that there will be something standing in the doorway, because the doorway is where things come to stand. Because unoccupied spaces, in our imaginations, must find something to fill them.

only critiques are 1) the sound that plays for the scene transitions is so fucking loud and blasts my eardrums out every single time and 2) the ending wasn’t bad, but wasn’t completely satisfying to me either. but the rest of the story was so strong that i think i’m ok w that.

overall one of my favorite pieces of media, esp when it comes to horror and haunted architecture. gonna be really hyperfocused on this for awhile. this whole story and the interview with the author live in my mind rent free.

[Abigail · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eskew is great, but sometimes I appreciate it more than I actually enjoy it. The Silt Verses is currently my favorite thing ever and this is a fantastic, fun, and quite terrifying predecessor. Jon and Muna are creative geniuses, and I can’t wait to see what they do next.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredibly rich Ligottian hellscape and an empathetic richness with the torments and tribulations endured by the protagonists. Ending however seems ill fitting personally.

[Medb Wills · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous horror.

[ella · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am in eskew lover . 5ever

[Bryony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once you listen to this it will never leave you. This masterpiece unlocked emotions I never felt before or since.

[Ruchita Nemade · Rating 3 out of 5]

After listening to he Sheridan Tapes and The Magnus Archives, this is just too monotonous for me.

I got bored after listening to the first episode

[Charcoal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not to be dramatic, but I will never find any other story that speaks to me to quite such a degree. I love this enough to become an elitist about it. If you GET this story, it becomes part of you, merging with you, becoming another organ, another breath. If you think anything less of it than you didn't GET it.

[Lobo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zwykle nie odznaczam podcastów, ale
a) może pora zacząć
b) piszę artykuł o różnych formach nawiedzenia w I am in Eskew i przeczytałam 300 stron transkrypcji, nie wspominając nawet o wielokrotnym odsłuchaniu, więc niech ten wysiłek zostanie udokumentowany.

Second listening: jest jeszcze lepsze.