The Magic and Horror of Nostalgia: An Exclusive Guest Post from Kiersten White, Author of Mister Magic

By Kiersten White / August 8, 2023 at 4:12 am

Hardcover $28.00

Mister Magic: A Novel

Hardcover $28.00

Kiersten White returns with a spine-tingling novel of nostalgia and fandom that is perfect for anyone who enjoyed Dead Eleven by Jimmy Juliano or Burn the Negative by Josh Winning. A children’s program with a cult following + former cast members trying to escape their shared past = a horrifying tale of what lies under the surface of memories, Mister Magic will give readers nightmares in a good way. Keep reading for an exclusive guest post about nostalgia and the way it’s both magical and horrifying.

Millennials are intimately familiar with horror. After all, we’re filled with dread every time we see another think piece written about us. Our intersection of horror and nostalgia, though, is fascinating because nostalgia plays an oversized part in our lives. And what is nostalgia, if not the far more pleasant cousin of trauma — an experience or feeling from your past so powerful that it shapes you without you ever realizing it.

My generation is the first adult population that has not only been able to reminisce about the bizarre things we watched and read and did as kids, but, thanks to the internet, been able to recover almost all of it. Unlike the generations after us, though, it’s not perfectly preserved. Much like a tape recorded onto time and time again, things get warped along the way.

What happens when the actual movie is different than the version you remember watching alone at 2 AM, when the lyrics to the song you’ve had in your head since you were five aren’t actually the lyrics, when you can’t track down that one piece of childhood ephemera that doesn’t seem to exist anywhere anymore?

What happens when the things that crystalized in your subconscious can’t ever be recovered or understood?

I love the aftereffects of childhood magic and trauma played out on the backdrop of adult experience, as well as the inherent loss that comes with growing up. Loss of potential, loss of memories, loss of wonder, loss of the structures you built around yourself and assumed would hold you up forever. Can any of those things ever be recaptured? And what would we pay — or how would we pay — if they could?

Mister Magic brings together a group of childhood friends trying to pool their fractured memories and figure out what actually happened that tragic last day on the set of their children’s television program. It’s about the arbitrary rules we were given as kids and told were absolute truth, and what happens when we defy them. And it’s about the manipulative darkness, figurative and, in this case, quite literal, that seeps beneath so much of what we grew up on.

If, like me, you can’t get enough of nostalgic horror, some favorite recent reads include Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, throwing us back to the dying days of film and two lifelong friends grappling with unexpected evil alongside opportunity; Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez, following characters from the exhilarating and terrifying mysteries of childhood to the regrets of disastrously failed parenthood (against a backdrop of some seriously bad magic); and Josh Malerman’s A House at the Bottom of a Lake, a surreal and uneasy celebration of the fragile — and dangerous — power of first love.

So, pull up a chair, open a book, and fall down a rabbit hole into horror. And remember, whatever nostalgia might whisper in your ear: You can’t control what you find in the past, or rebury what you might unearth…