When Horror Preaches Itself To Death

There is a version of Mr. Magic that should have been perfect for me. A half-forgotten children’s television show from the 1980s. Damaged former child actors. Missing tapes. The uncanny feeling that something once comforting was quietly poisonous. On paper, this is pure fantasy gold. In practice, it felt like sitting through a lecture disguised as a lame episode of “Are you afraid of the Dark”.

The story itself evokes parts of Channel Zero (especially seasons one and four) with dashes of Stephen King’s The Institute: eerie childhood spaces, institutional control, adults shaping children into something they never agreed to be. That atmosphere works. The bones are there. But the book never trusts those bones to hold weight on their own.

Early on, the main character, Val, nearly torpedoes the book by herself. She “girl-bosses” her way out of any real likability — abrasive, defensive, and emotionally closed off in a way that doesn’t feel layered so much as performative. Instead of being someone you slowly understand, she’s someone who keeps telling you what she is and why she’s right.

I lost track of how many times some version of “I was really happy back then” gets repeated. Nostalgia is supposed to feel unreliable and haunted. Here, it just feels self-indulgent — a mantra rather than a mystery. And that’s the core problem. Good horror lets you discover the rot. Mr. Magic keeps stopping to tell you what the rot is.

Instead of letting the lost TV show speak for itself, the book keeps explaining: this is about religious trauma, this is about control, this is about how rules ruin children, this is why the author is angry. The result is a story that feels less like being slowly unsettled and more like being walked through a therapy session.

It comes across as a metaphor for how the rules parents place on children inevitably destroy them — which would be a far more compelling idea if it weren’t presented so bluntly and without nuance. The implication seems to be that children should be freed from structure entirely, because after all, if there’s any demographic that really has a firm grasp on how reality works, it’s children.

Right.

By the time the book reaches its big emotional and thematic moments, the horror and interest has already evaporated. Nothing lingers. Nothing breathes. The story doesn’t trust you to understand it on your own — it insists on telling you exactly what you’re supposed to think.

I can’t recommend avoiding this book enough.