Alien Dread and Cinematic Horrors:
Christopher Zeischegg’s The Magician

by Andie Blaine

Christopher Zeischegg’s The Magician (Apocalypse Party, 2024) compresses time like a freakish film that thrills the mind and chills the body. Zeischegg writes autofiction as cinematic horror. I felt nauseous with each dive into the story, even believing several times I was getting sick, mirroring the body of the main character, also named Christopher.

The sparest of language in The Magician evokes pure fear. Early on in the book, Christopher discovers his girlfriend near death after another suicide attempt. Her gore becomes his after the couple visits her sugar daddy. Cartel violence overlays the reality of Zeischegg’s life, wherein he recounts years of performing in pornos, recalling the harsh lighting and drugs to shock one into false intimacy. After his girlfriend’s sugar daddy leaves Christopher to rot in a body bag, he is saved by a fellow sex worker he meets at an Al-Anon meeting. Christopher is nursed to a shabby level of health and learns that this woman, Jayla, is a witch.

There are several predictable components of magick: various types of blood, Latin incantations, evil energies trapped within, and Luciferian ideas and imagery (Think silk-clad goats). Even though I was mildly put off by this, I felt that it showed the duality of demonic, blood-driven magick and the purity of God that Christopher’s family so fervently believes in. This duality creates tension in several ways at once, as Christopher struggles with his own belief. Swathes of pseudo-religious dialogue illustrate the endless cliches and depressing monotony of regular people looking upwards at various gods for help. It is effective in producing dread and alienation, burrowing into Christopher’s endless idle episodes, especially after he moves back in with his religious parents.

If you’ve read The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis, you know the powerful propulsion of a well-formed narrative. The Magician shares that propulsion. In some ways, it is even sicker than Ellis’s novel, especially as the dialogue is not nearly as poignant as the terse, overthinking narrator, Bret, (also named after its author) in The Shards.

The Magician was released alongside a short film directed by Zeischegg, but I think it would be brilliant as a full-length film, screened in a dark room. The story succeeds from several angles, absorbing in its endlessly shifting narrative. It is deeply transportive; Call a friend when you’re done.