Book Review: Mister Magic by Kiersten White (2023)

Oct 15

Written By Wyatt

(this review contains spoilers.)

I’m not going to be cynical about the premise of Mister Magic even though it’s egregiously blatant nostalgia bait for millennials like myself. At the center of the plot is a mysterious 90s children’s program, Mister Magic, which has no analog legacy or physical artifacts connecting it to the current day. The program seemingly only exists in the aging memories of its viewers, whose forum posts and wiki articles on the topic are frequently deleted, removed, or edited shortly after their appearance.

An American of my age with a public television-upbringing is completely incapable of cynicism when presented with such a perfect concept, and I purchased the book halfway through the single-sentence description given to me. Take my money, Kiersten White; I am your sucker.

Childhood Shot to Tape

The story is told from the perspective of Val (alternately called Valentine and Valentina), a thirty-eight-year-old woman who, three decades before, was the leader of the last group of children featured on Mister Magic before the show’s mysterious disapperance. The series focused on the powers of imagination and the adventures which could be had within it, and featured a mysterious cape-and-top-hat figure who was its namesake. The magical entity imparted lessons to the children and corrected their course any time their play went too far outside of the proscribed boundaries, be they morale or mannerly.

Since abruptly departing the show under strange circumstances, Val has been living at an off-the-grid horse farm in Idaho with her father, who has meticulously sealed her off from the outside world, and Gloria, the no-nonsense owner of the farm. Her mother and any siblings are out of the picture, and her father refuses to speak on why.

Val is at once a likable but mysterious protagonist who clearly has a lot going on beneath the surface. She is strong and assertive, but carries a mysterious fear of open doors, is haunted by dreams of televisions in dark rooms, and prefers to sleep in closets where she can control the space and put a door between herself and the outside world. Val also has amnesia about all events prior to coming to the ranch.

This puts the reader on very uncertain footing right from the start, as the main character has no narrative of her own about the pivotal events at the heart of the novel, and, more problematic, no capacity to evaluate the information presented to her, both at the outset and as the story progresses. Amnesia is a tricky thing in literature; it’s an effective mechanic for generating intrigue that also robs the character of making trustworthy conclusions that the reader can put faith in. The end result of this is that the first twenty percent of the novel feels hurried, following a tight, formulaic approach to “get us to the good stuff.” This isn’t a major flaw, but I was very conscious of it.

Shortly after meeting Val, we’re given the first major setpiece and inciting incident: the funeral of her father. In addition to ranch hands and friends, a Facebook post about the event attracts strangers from far away–Val’s former castmates on Mister Magic–to come seeking her for a reunion podcast about the show that will bring the friends together again, and hopefully, dispel some of the mystery around Mister Magic.

Familiar Circles

Early in the novel, I was getting major IT vibes from Mister Magic. We have an abrupt reunion of childhood friends with a magical figure at the center, and at least for Val, a case of significant amnesia seemingly centered around the events of the show’s end. While the character of Mister Magic isn’t overtly evil, he is regarded with trepidation, a firm-handed authority figure who brings anxiety as much as wonder. The story hinges very much on the dynamic of the particular characters, who, whilst a bit archetype-y, are interesting enough at the start.

There’s Isaac, the bespectacled anchor of the group who helps keep everyone secure and moving in the same direction; Marcus, the handsome, gay, black character who has been closeted for much of his life; Javi, the smarmy, intelligent, impish Puck of the group—who is probably the most engaging character of the bunch—and Jenny. The best way to say it is that Jenny is the killjoy. She’s a stern stay-at-home mother who has given her life to her kids and in turn forgotten large parts of herself, alternatively pitiable and pitiless.

At the outset it is a very solid cast, though each character struggles for page time as the story wends on, only making small explorations outside of their established personalities before reverting to form. I definitely wanted a bit more depth and complexity from the characters, and they’re by no means poor, just perhaps a third underbaked. This is a tight, short novel, with a large cast, so there’s only so much time for development.

As to pacing more broadly, the first few chapters of the book felt very much like set-dressing, hurrying through the setup so that readers could dive headlong into the story itself. A third of the way into the book, my enthusiasm couldn’t have been greater, as White had successfully set up a number of effective angles, conflicts, and challenges to the group of friends. She also made exceptional use of paratext, opening and bridging chapters with creepy discussion board exchanges, wiki articles, and other small vignettes that help flesh out the story behind the television show at the center of the plot. These are uniformly sharp, and one of the book’s best features.

We’ll Find the Answers?

The main story isn’t quite as strong as many of its components. All of the supporting cast save Marcus are portrayed in a suspicious light at some point, and the reader has really no great way to measure the validity of their claims against the backstory, as it’s ever-forming and perpetually questionable. Despite her headstrong and assertive nature, Val often feels powerless in the context of the story until someone comes along and points her in a new direction (at one point, a previously unknown character approach Val and gives her a video tape full of answers. The character never reappears). This created a discordant element I never quite got onboard with, and just doesn’t feel like something that should be allowed in a traditionally published novel.

The cast proceeds to the podcast reunion, which is inexplicably being recorded in a nightmarish six-story house in a remote part of southern Utah. To make matters more creepy, some of the cast members have memories of their families living in the strange building, where each floor is a recreation of a single-family home connected to a doorless stairwell between the floors. The practical result of this is that there are no real ways for occupants to put a barrier between themselves and others.

This is all extremely unsettling, and it was around this point that the novel hit its strongest note. Val is at once drawn to Isaac and wary of some of his behavior, while Jenny and Javi clearly know more than what they’ve shared. Each cast member goes to the basement to record their podcast interview, and these cryptic and unsettling sessions end with something promised in exchange for the cast member singing a particular song. It's very eerie, and substantially raises expectations for the rest of the novel.

As the story progresses, we learn that Mister Magic was created and produced by a secretive community in southern Utah, an exiled Mormon branch who founded the town of Bliss, where everything looks like an idealized representation of white, 1950s America. We also learn that Mister Magic, for better or worse, was effectively a propaganda tool used by these Mormons to impart their values on the wider world. If you’re disappointed about that revelation, you may be able to temper the feeling a bit with this: Mister Magic is indeed magical and not simply a propaganda piece, but the how and why isn’t something we get with this initial reveal.

Bless Your Heart

Alongside the main plot, and at times overtaking it, there are a lot of themes about casual racism, cultural toxicity, purity culture, and all of the problematic things adjacent to organized religion in the United States. I have mixed feelings about how these are engaged in the book. On one hand, I feel great sympathy for Kiersten White and her flight from Mormonism, and have family members who have literally done the same, upending their lives in the middle of adulthood to cast off something that had framed their world more or less since birth. It’s a tremendously difficult thing, and a burden carried long after the initial decision to leave the church arrives. For all its successes and failures, this novel is foremost a love letter and affirmation to those who have escaped the Mormon faith, and all other things come second.

On the other hand, I feel some of these well-intended explorations are problematic, and the repetition and explication of these themes vastly outshines the actual plot of the novel. I personally agree with White in her positions on the aforementioned social elements, as well as the racism she tries to contend with, but reading about these things with what is an ultimately thin sheen of a horror novel just feels like disappointment.

The first sensation of dismay came with the revelations about Bliss. When there was nothing more behind the television program but a group of old-fashioned religious fanatics trying to impose their worldview on children. That’s very real, but it’s not an especially great story. Mister Magic, while later revealed to be a magical character, is never explained or connected to the Mormon offshoot that controls him.

While I have no doubt the intentions were good, I also find a lot of the social explorations to be rote and marked by a bit of tokenism and othering depictions. Marcus, who gets to be both black and gay, romantically pairs off with the only other person of color, Javi, later in the novel. It draws a weird line between the white and non-white members of the cast, a lowkey persistence of the othering idea that even though we’re saying the right things, these brown men are the deviants. Isaac is still very much the parochial patriarch, having very few qualities other than loyalty and protectiveness, the hallmarks of a traditional and conservative head of the household. Given what White was aiming to achieve, I would have liked to see a bit more nuance and uniqueness in these characters.

It’s not a major sin, and probably won’t bother anyone else. Everyone gets out torches over ideas of privilege and marginalization, while few people seem to have the intellectual elasticity to scrutinize tokenism and othering depictions of non-white characters. I personally would love to see more non-white characters who aren’t primarily or exclusively defined by their narratives of non-whiteness. I’m exhausted by characters like Marcus and Javi who appear in stories as near-pristine individuals who defy all stereotypes, but remain limited characters whose defining experiences are solely those of oppression or marginalization. That is not the real world, and if more white authors actually had brown friends who aren’t in academia, they might know this.

Please don’t conflate my criticism of the lackluster story as any sort of opposition to the writer’s thematic viewpoints, I simply award far fewer points than most critics for trotting out the same tired observations about social inequality. The great misstep of this novel is that these familiar themes are used as a stand-in for something tangibly satisfying and evil; in the end it’s just plain old social ills, dressed up in a fantasy town called Bliss, that are pulling the strings behind the scenes, and that makes for less interesting read in my assessment. We’ve had this kind of novel popularized for over a decade now, and I’m just ready for the next evolution.

I may be an outlier in that I don’t gush over works where the literary themes of a story are put front and center while the plot is left to languish. As a critic, I find that that anathema to the very idea of literature: we are here to tell stories. But with all of that being said, and while I struggle with elements of the execution, I do find the social themes of Mister Magic to be particularly eloquently stated at points, and issues of tokenism and othering aside, soundly rooted in their ethical convictions; I am criticizing a work, not an author. I have no doubt that the perspectives articulated by White are rooted in hard-won life experience, I just wish she had developed a stronger narrative to which she could attach them.

Closing Thoughts

Mister Magic is about an otherworldly children’s show that no one can quite remember, and the evil power behind that show is some sort of moralistic engine of the Mormon church which makes children docile and obedient. What the entity is, where it came from, why it’s bound to a children’s show, and where it came from are never explored, leaving the heart of the story feeling hollow. This is a textbook example of a cool concept idea that never developed the narrative structure to support the initial inspiration that birthed it. What is behind the curtain is ultimately an unsatisfying mishmash of loose ends that are haphazardly tied up, blending half-developed mythologies with half-developed characters to be the stand-in for the tangible evil in the novel. While it’s all done in the name of an ethical worldview, this is not a great read by the end.

The overwhelming feeling with this novel is that the author wants to write a spooky story about a group of childhood friends while also penning a modern morality tale about the dangers of purity culture and casual racism. Keeping a foot in each lane, White struggles to drive either narrative at more than a surface level, and the novel feels far short of what it could have been.

Score: 5.8

Strengths

Top-tier premise
Some really solid writing
Decent characters

Weaknesses

Feelings over finesse; style over substance
Story falters in the final third
Depictions of non-white characters feel slightly othering

You can purchase Mister Magic from Amazon, Target, Barnes and Noble, or preferably, through a bookstore in your community.