★★★☆☆ Great idea undermined by small faults

The Magnus Archives: Season 1

Jonathan Sims, Rusty Quill

The Magnus Archives is a free podcast from Rusty Quill. Season 1 consists of 40 episodes (I think that's true of all five seasons), each about half an hour long. Most of the episodes consist of the author, Jonathan Sims, reading reports into a tape recorder, in character as Head Archivist of The Magnus Institute. The Archivist's name is also Jonathan Sims. I will refer to the character as "Jonathan".

I began The Magnus Archives by looking for a way to read it, rather than listen to it. I did not find one at the time, and thus ended up listening to Season 1. After finishing Season 1 a further exploration of the Rusty Quill web site led to a solution. Transcripts of all episodes are available free from Rusty Quill in PDF form. You can download all 40 Season 1 transcripts, combine them into one big file on your computer (e.g., using acrobat or ghostscript), and send it to your kindle. I don't particularly recommend this, but the option is available.

The fictional Magnus Institute is a London organization that collects and inconsistently investigates reports of the paranormal. Apparently people who have spooky experiences are encouraged to wander in and write down a report. It was founded in 1818 and is therefore 200 years old. A lot of reports have been collected in that time and are stored in the archives. Jonathan has just became Head Archivist after the mysterious disappearance of the previous Head Archivist Gertrude Robinson. Jonathan is dismayed at the disorganized state of the archive. For reasons that are never explained, he wishes to have all the reports in audio form. He therefore chooses specific reports (how? never explained) and reads them aloud into a cassette tape recorder. (Digital recording doesn't work, for some mysterious reason.) With a few exceptions, each episode consists of Jonathan's reading one report. He follows the reading of the report with a discussion of its investigation by himself and his assistant archivists.

Each report is a seriously creepy story, usually with lethal consequences for some of the parties involved. At first, the stories are unrelated to each other and unrelated to the Magnus Institute, and Jonathan's is the only voice we hear. Starting at about episode 20, however (thus, halfway through the season), a plot puts in an appearance. We also begin to hear the voices of people other than Jonathan -- mostly other personnel at the Magnus Institute. This comes to a climax in episode 39, and episode 40 sets the scene for continuation.

Although the stories are genuinely creepy, my overall impression of Season 1 was monotony. There is too much of Jonathan, and the stories are too much the same. It is certainly a relief when a plot appears and we begin to hear some other voices, but for me it was too little too late. It is possible that the problems that bothered me were first-season teething troubles. Still, I don't plan to continue with later seasons. I've heard enough.

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The Magnus Archives on Rusty Quill

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