#like. that was a deliberate choice to have his hand on swaine’s back. on some level he still trusts that swaine will keep him safe

[exgirlfiend]

sorry the fact that marcassin holds onto swaine when riding tengri is getting to me again

[centaurianthropology]

The Magnus Archives ‘Literary Heights’ (S02E06) Analysis

Oooo … Jergen Leitner’s library is back, as are a few old faces from a few old cases.  We get a continuation of the lore around Leitner, a creepy cosmic horror tale of madness, lightning, and vast unknowable monstrosities, and an Archivist who continues to unravel.  

Jonny Sims delivers a great chilling tale this week, and in my favorite subgenre of horror.  He also continues to impress me with how he can so perfectly communicate Sims’ mental unravelling in the short supplementals we get at the end of the episodes, often more through his delivery than through actual words.  ‘Literary Heights’ is an excellent episode and a continuation of my favorite of TMA’s plot threads.

If you’d like to read me break down not only this episode, but as much of the Leitner plot as it relates to, come on in!

First off, can we talk about this world for a second?  It’s come up before in passing, but it struck me this week how the notion of studying the occult, demonology, and other paranormal fields is treated as a valid academic choice.  The idea that Mike might be a student of the occult in college seems perfectly normal to our protagonist, Herbert.  The more I hear, the more I think that the TMA world is one like ours, but not quite. The paranormal, much as it is in Lovecraft’s work, is something respectable as an academic field of study at least in the same way that folklore would be, and maybe even given greater credence.  This course of study may raise a few eyebrows, but no more so than becoming a funeral director or a specialist in Nahuatl might.  This is a world where the paranormal is closer to the skin, as it were.

Sorry, it’s just very interesting to me, the subtle way that the cosmic horror elements are worked into this world, and they ways in which they change it.

Okay, now that I’ve addressed that, let’s talk lore.  Because Leitner’s library is back, and everyone knows that means fun.  We find out that Leitner died in 1994 (this was also when ‘the incident’ that Sims mentioned in ‘Page Turner’ occurred). From then up to 1998, when this statement was given, a surprising number of rare booksellers either died or went missing, and I suspect it was because quite a few of Leitner’s tomes came into their possession at that time.  If Sims is clever enough to look into it (or if he found pursuing the Leitner library a priority anymore), I would wonder if the number of sellers who died, and the chain of custody of their acquisitions, might well give him a far better estimation of how many Leitners survived ‘the incident’ than they’ve had so far.

We also get a return of ‘Ex Altiore’ from “Page Turner”, this time told by someone who could read it. The book, as it turns out, is an epic poem in the style of Virgil detailing a small town watching and preparing for the approach of something called a beast, a demon, or a god alternatively: a giant thing with its head hidden in the clouds.  Each preparation they make is foiled as the thing is revealed to be vaster and vaster until they hurl themselves off the cliff to their deaths rather than face it.  He also discusses the woodcuts, which are apparently all of the scenery in the story, and also notices that they are both crude and deeply unsettling.  He got dizzy spells throughout the week he owned it until he managed to sell it, but interestingly enough he never mentions the empty sky woodcut that so unsettled Dominic Swain in ‘Page Turner’.

We also get a return of Michael Crew, who appeared in both ‘Page Turner’ and ‘The Bone Turner’s Tale’, although not in the flesh since Dominic Swain’s childhood recollections of him (more on those in a bit).  What we now learn is that Michael seems to be pursued by a monster, much as the people in the book were: something tall and thin, with limbs that branch like that scar and a body that strobes with electricity.  He eventually “gives himself” to ‘Ex Altiore’ in a belltower, and hurls himself and the monster that pursues him out of the window, vanishing.  Could this mean that ‘Ex Altiore’ consumed Michael, integrating him into the book as that woodcut later seen by Dominic Swain?

To try to hunt down answers, I immediately hopped back and listened to both ‘Page Turner’ and ‘The Bone Turner’s Tale’.  I wanted to catch all the possible callbacks.  

Page Turner

Here’s our first mention of Michael Crew, as well as the reason he had the Lichtenberg figure scar across his back: Dominic Swain, our protagonist, was his childhood friend. Dominic refused to go in from playing outside during a thunderstorm, and Michael was hit by lightning.

The first thing I noticed in ‘Page Turner’, aside from the presence of the empty night sky woodcut, was that the ozone smell accompanied it.  This is further evidence that ‘Ex Altiore’ consumed Michael Crew as well as whatever was pursuing him. This may directly relate him to the people in the story who jumped to their deaths.  In fact, it got me to thinking about the inherent double-meaning in the title of the book: initially it seems to refer to the monster that appears from the heights, but by the end of the story it also refers to the people who eventually plunged from the heights to their deaths.  I wonder how many of those woodcuts actually represent a person driven to jump through the despair they faced when pursued by these vast, impossible horrors.  Did this book come to Michael deliberately, knowing what followed him?  Can we attribute that sort of malevolent consciousness to the book, or is something else entirely at play?  

I think it’s also notable that, when Dominic looked through ‘Ex Altiore’ at Mary Kaeye’s house, he saw thick black branching lines descending from the sky.  Could this have to do with the black tendrils that populate the dream London Antonio Blake / Oliver sees?  The fact that this book seems to tie to jumping to death might have some relevance there.

Finally, it’s interesting to hear the evolution (or devolution) of Sims from this early point to now.  His determination to eliminate all the Leitner books and ensure that they could do no more harm—the fact that he seemed more passionate about that goal than most things—can be contrasted to the very disturbing assertion this week that he wishes he could have read ‘Ex Altiore’, and his general disregard of the threat of Leitner’s library he seemed so adamant about when he first started his work in the archives.  I’ll talk more on this later, but the difference is striking.  

The Bone Turner’s Tale

The initial part of Sebastian Adekoya’s statement is interesting.  He describes words in books almost as an infection, spreading from page to a person’s mind long after the death of the author.  They mutate in new cultures and lose their initial meaning, but their core persists.  The way he describes it reminds me of the Hive.  We know that the Hive hated the Magnus Institute and particularly its desire to record and catalogue the details of the Hive and other paranormal things.  Is this why? Is the nearly parasitic nature of the written word something dangerously like a rival to the Hive, just as much as it is a weapon against it?

How, then, does Leitner fit into this cosmology?  His books are monstrous unto themselves.  The parasites that are the words inside are dangerous and deadly.  His books seem less about knowledge and more about death, but that is from a very limited perspective.  Could he have found a way to survive the horrors of the books and gain instead some sort of greater knowledge?

Michael Crew returns in this story as the person who returned ‘The Bone Turner’s Tale’ to the library in which Sebastian was working.  Was this deliberate?  It certainly seems that Michael had found himself invested in Leitner’s library long before he became involved with ‘Ex Altiore’.  Was he a student of demonology or the occult who got mixed up in something a bit too real, the way Herbert thought?  Did he acquire his strange pursuer, and only gain an interest then, after he needed to find a way to make it leave?  What even was it, and why is it after him?  Having listened to ‘The Bone Turner’s Tale’ again, I can’t think that its contents bear any resemblance to what happened to him, so why did he have the book?  Was he looking into any paranormal book, and he ran across a Leitner by accident.  Did he recognize the power in them, and think to use it to solve his problem?

And then there’s the question of why he would mock up ‘The Bone Turner’s Tale’ as a book from the Chiswick library.  Why inflict it on someone else?  Someone random?  How did we get from a childhood friend struck by lightning to someone willing to inflict Leitner onto an unsuspecting public?  I feel like Michael Crew himself is a fascinating mystery, and I hope that eventually we might get a statement from the man himself.

It’s also interesting that Sims says he’s seen first-hand what a Leitner can do.  We don’t really know what Sims’ background with Leitner’s books is, although I wonder if it either got him into the Institute in the first place, or alternatively was the first major experience he had at the Institute and it stuck with him.  Either way, it makes what he said at the end of the statement about wishing he could have read ‘Ex Altiore’ all the more concerning.  And speaking of …

Jonathan Sims

Oh, Sims, you are in such a bad way at this point.  At what point did your understandable caution regarding these books transmute to wanting to read them?  I think it’s not only indicative of his mental state, but also of the exhaustion and fear that are eating away at him.  Does the Archivist have a death wish?  Is the notion of being done in by a Leitner more appealing than the idea that he can’t trust any of his friends?  I feel like this is a quiet but real acknowledgement of how far he’s crumbled since the early days, and how badly he needs help.  Even if he doesn’t recognize it as such.

His supplemental statement this week doesn’t give us a lot more insight into his mental state, but it does give us a bit more about what’s going on in the archives.  It seems that someone else is going down into the tunnels, but when Sims tried to investigate he found spiderwebs throughout the tunnels, and large spiders eating the worm remains (a return to ‘Arachnophobia’, perhaps?).  He did the smart thing (for once) and left.  He’s going to be setting up a camera to catch whoever was doing it (my money is on Martin investigating or Not-Sasha doing something shady), so maybe he’ll lay off stalking Tim for a while.

Conclusions

A nice, lore-rich story that’s heavily Lovecraft flavored.  Between the vast horror in ‘Ex Altiore’, Mike hurling himself out of the window (and possibly into the book itself) to get rid of the horror following him, and that creeping desire to read Leitner’s works that seems to seize even Sims, I got strong indications of ‘Hunter in the Dark’, ‘Dagon’, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ and ‘The King in Yellow’.  All of which I love, so count me in as one happy listener!

This episode was fairly lore heavy, tying into ‘Page Turner’ and ‘The Bone Turner’s Tale’ as much as it did, but I still found it very engaging in its own right.  The story itself could stand alone, even if you didn’t know Michael Crew, the significance of the Lichtenberg figure on his back, or why his connection with Leitner runs so deep.  Indeed, it was fascinating, and made me wonder a great deal about that character, and the thing that was following him.  This episode advanced the lore while raising new questions, tied two previous statements together, and still didn’t give us any real answers.  And all that? Is what I love most about this story. The deeper you get the worse things seem, and every answer leads to ten new questions.  

Consider the Leitner storyline my favorite of the Bumps in the Night that this podcast continues to serve up, and this episode a worthy entry to that plot.