There is a nightmarish quality to Christopher Zeischegg’s The Magician. I read the book twice, the first time through the haze of an all nighter—sleep deprivation and sleep paralysis hastening my descent into the blur of self destruction and bodily decay that the narrative presents. “Just a thing inside your body that won’t listen to your head,” a malignant acquaintance tells the narrator early in the novel, as a prescription of sorts for the root of all his problems. At dawn, this rings true. This distance between body and self, judgment and subconscious, good and evil, is perhaps the root of all that is hellish.
The Magician was originally published in 2020 by indie press Amphetamine Sulphate but had, until recently, fallen out of circulation. The edition of The Magician that I read is a reissue, recently published by Apocalypse Party Press in November 2024 with an added introduction by author and artist Chris Kelso, and a new cover by Christopher Norris. Zeischegg intended for the novel to be consumed as a triptych, accompanied by a short film and an art book, but these are unavailable to me, and so the novel stands alone, a highly corporeal narrative speaking for itself without visual supplement.
In The Magician, Christopher Zeischegg, a fictional protagonist who shares the author’s name, lurches through California in a hallucinatory descent into horror, gore, torture, and the occult. Christopher, in his early thirties, is a former porn star (he shares the author’s former adult film alias of Danny Wylde) who has left the industry after abusing performance drugs, and is now embroiled in an unsalvageable relationship with his drug addicted and deeply suicidal girlfriend Andrea. The novel opens with Andrea’s latest suicide attempt, the first line of the novel echoing text on the back cover, seemingly intent on provoking the reader into intrigue and/or horror for what is in store—“Andrea’s gore was dark red, nearly brown, and smelled of meat and piss. She must have wet herself on account of the drugs…”
There is little value in a book that seeks only to shock, and in its self identification, The Magician seems to dare the reader to draw this immediate conclusion. Zeischegg is a former porn star, the novel is auto fiction and body horror and it places itself in Los Angeles, in the porn industry, in a land of devil worship and torture and addiction. The reissue of the novel comes only four years after the original publication, but those four years have been formative for the collective understanding of autofiction, for the Literary Thrill-Seeking Industrial Complex, for Bret Easton Ellis and his imitators, for the contrarian, the provocateur, for autofiction often that is now a*tofiction because this author is ironic, this author realizes that our absorption with ourselves is becoming a bit obscene. There is admitted sensationalism in the very names of those championing Zeischegg’s work: “Amphetamine Sulphate” and “Apocalypse Party Press”, the latter of which comes with some warnings of its own: “Anyone with an open mind is welcome to join the party” “Once the void swallows you whole, you’ll never be the same.”
Still, beyond those first few pages, it becomes clear that The Magician is more than just a challenge for the daring. At what Christopher refers to as an Alcoholics-Lovers Anonymous (AL-Anon) meeting, he runs into Jayla, another porn star who he filmed with in the past. She attacks him with pepper spray and harvests his blood for Satanic supernatural purposes. This, of course, sets off a downward spiral of torture, violence that remains Christopher’s seemingly only consistent tether to reality, and a throughline for the novel. The Magician contrasts searing physical pain with a dissociated gaze and occasional poignant descriptions of the mountains on the horizon of the Los Angeles night sky. We follow Christopher pining for Andrea, gasping for air in a body bag by the LA River, and then desperate to expel the demons that are destroying himself and his family whilst seeking refuge in his deeply religious mother’s home. As his problems scale towards the cosmic and the supernatural, the seemingly sensational opening lines become points of almost absurdist inconsequentiality. Suicide and addiction, as it turns out, are luxury problems amidst a reckoning with the occult.
Autofiction can bore in its needlessly self referential nature, but The Magician deals more in the realm of the alter ego. Noir can falter in a didactic rendering of good and evil, but there is a banality to the way the narrative swallows and stomachs the ever-worsening horror of the world it exists within, which lends itself almost to absurdity. Zeischegg has described the novel as a parallel to the years following his own departure from the porn industry, and yet The Magician does not deal heavily in metaphor. Christopher, for all his drifting, disassociated, tendencies, is a reliable narrator. One never suspects that his hallucinatory recollections are, in actuality, hallucinations. One never suspects that the demon clawing at his stomach is a stand-in for something more abstract. The gashes on his stomach are real, as is his mother’s graying skin and progressing illness in the company of Christopher and his demon; as is the instant resurrection of order when—with the help of a full moon, hen’s blood and the wood from a cypress tree—he is able to expel the demon. There are moments of body horror throughout the novel that make me reflexively gag, but for the most part, reading The Magician is a steady experience. The banality of evil is established, enforced, and then reinforced again and again and again. You have entered into some realm of darkness. The rules are different here. Christopher, intuitively, seems to grasp this immediately. He does what he can to survive. His suffering, at least, serves as a reminder that he is real.
The novel begins with Christopher insistent on his normalcy. At an AL-Anon meeting he tunes into another young man’s speech because “he was young and vibrant and I could imagine us being friends” He does not identify with the freaks, and strikingly, he does nothing very wrong to become one. The narrative, while cohesive, is driven by whim and bad luck. Christopher becomes who he is because he is chosen as a host for this demon. The rest of it, and even this circumstance in and of itself, is left up to chance.
The Magician ends not too far from how it began. After ridding himself of his demon, Christopher is normal, gaining weight, aging, still in his mother’s home and now, a bit discontent. “I used to be a porn star,” he tells a young woman after she refers to him as a “fat fuck”. Finally free from his own demon, he has attended a party with a local magician who he hopes might teach him his ways. It happens that this magician got here mostly by a stroke of desperate luck—he stumbled upon a Magick book in the woods after shooting himself in the head. And as it turns out, after escaping torture of the supernatural scale, Christopher is now bored.
“I was someone who had bent the world to my will,” Christopher insists in the novel’s final pages. This identification with self autonomy is in sharp contrast to the passivity that defines him throughout the book, and yet he speaks with sincerity. He has mistaken adjacency to a power that beheld him with agency over a power he could never really harness. The Magician moralizes nothing. There are no clear conclusions as to where the novel’s dreamscape intersects with auto-fictional reality. Still, if there is a conclusion outside of the vacuum world into which The Magician sucks readers, it lies here. From dust to dust, and from mundane to mundane. Zeischegg speaks to the alter egos which we craft, suffer with, and live in along the way.